It’s been 365 days since Pump Fun promised an airdrop was ‘coming soon’

Tomorrow marks one year since memecoin platform Pump Fun announced that an airdrop for its $PUMP token would be “coming soon.” Users are still waiting.

The promise was made on July 9, 2025, during a Pump Fun marketing push that tried to paint itself as a competitor against social media giants Facebook, TikTok, and Twitch.

It also announced its ICO of the platform’s token, $PUMP, which is now down almost 75% since its launch almost a year ago.

Pump Fun Chief Operating Officer, Alon Cohen, tempered expectations one day after the airdrop pledge, saying that it wouldn’t be happening in the “immediate future.”

Users, including crypto influencer Ansem (real name Zion Thomas), have been begging for Pump Fun to make good on its airdrop promise ever since.

On the Market Bubble podcast this week, Ansem called for Pump Fun to align more with its community and said that if he had the keys to the firm, he would start to plan for an airdrop.

He claimed that the promised airdrop would’ve involved 24% of $PUMP’s allocation, and added that users “are mad as fuck at Pump Fun for a ton of different reasons, but one of them is they never airdropped to their core users.”

Last month, Ansem launched his own Pump Fun token called The Black Bull, which has managed to reach a market cap of $175 million in just seven days. He’s already airdropped almost $7 million across 700 wallets.

Bubblemaps noted one wallet received over $1 million, six wallets received over $100,000 each, 40 wallets received over $10,000 each, 300 wallets received over $1,000 each, and 400 wallets received over $150 each.

A Pump Fun airdrop of sorts already took place in December 2025 after the platform acquired memecoin trading terminal, Padre.

After the acquisition, Pump Fun said it would no longer support the usage of the terminal’s PADRE token, and the price of PADRE sank 67%.

There was intense backlash among PADRE holders, and eventually Pump Fun agreed to distribute a $PUMP airdrop to those holders affected by the price swing.

Pump Fun is doing everything but airdropping

Pump Fun was launched in January 2024 as a memecoin generator. Since then, it’s been busy trying out new ventures and different ways to monetize its operations since it announced the supposedly imminent airdrop.

One day after announcing the ICO and airdrop, it acquired the wallet tracker Kolscan.

Then, in April 2026, the platform announced that it had burned $370 million worth of $PUMP tokens that it had bought back (around 36% of the circulating supply) in an attempt to “gain trust with our community.”

It also committed to buying back and burning future $PUMP tokens using 50% of its revenue across the next year. This post alone is filled with Pump Fun users demanding an airdrop.

In response to the closure of X Communities, in May this year, Pump Fun announced its own space for crypto communities.

One month later, it released a controversial bounty program that saw some crypto traders promise to pay $50,000 to anyone willing to skydive into an ongoing World Cup match and invade the pitch.

This particular bounty was later removed. Others remained, however, including one that involved people tattooing various crypto tickers onto their foreheads in an attempt to secure bounties.

Also in June, Pump Fun removed an AI agent launch feature after it led to too much “PVP.”

Cohen said, “It was originally created with the intention of bootstrapping onchain agents with automated buyback & burn mechanics. However, the feature was mostly used for non-agent implementations, which led to griefing, confusion amongst traders, and unnecessary PVP.”

The firm is always adjusting ways in which the ecosystem it created can maintain momentum.

Indeed, a foundation called Glass Half Full was launched by the firm in August 2025 to help inject liquidity into various popular and “organic” Pump Fun crypto communities, as many failed to take off.

Pump Fun has legal troubles

Pump Fun has been grappling with a lawsuit that was filed against it in January 2025 by legal firms Burwick Law and Wolf Popper LLP.

This lawsuit was eventually expanded to include racketeering charges in July 2025.

It accuses Pump Fun of organizing a racketeering enterprise, disguised as a memecoin platform, that behaves like an illegal online casino skewed against users.

In this lawsuit, Burwick Law was recently forced to apologise for, and correct, various citations and grammatical errors, including multiple misplaced quotation marks.

This, alongside the structure of its recently filed Iggy Azalea lawsuit, suggests it may be using AI in its filed lawsuits.

In June, Cohen announced that Pump Fun’s parent company is looking for a chief legal officer and would be willing to offer a base salary anywhere between $1 million and $5 million.

The on-chain analyst X account EmberCN estimates that since 2024, Pump Fun has sold a total of 4.73 million SOL ($805 million) made from its fee revenue.

Crypto tracker DefiLlama estimates that Pump Fun’s revenue over the last year is almost $400 million. Its volume on the platform across the last 30 days was $1.4 billion.

Meanwhile, its volume dwarfs its competitors. Dune analytics compiled by @adam_tehc show Pump Fun’s 24-hour volume reached $91 million, while its second-biggest computer, Bonk Fun, only saw $435,740 in volume.

Despite all this and the constant clamour for an airdrop, Pump Fun is yet to deliver.