Pump.fun is the leader among Solana projects for its native token buybacks. The team poured in over $205M into PUMP for the past five months.
Pump.fun continues with its PUMP buybacks, still pouring in most of its fees into decreasing the supply of its native token.
To date, the team has poured $205M into buybacks, for over 99% of its daily fees. In total, the team bought back 13.86% of the supply, helping PUMP bounce from its lows.
Pump.fun spent over $205M for regular buybacks, putting almost all its daily fees back into its native PUMP token. | Source: Pump.fun fees.
The approach of Pump.fun passes all other Solana projects, which mostly retain their fees. Pump.fun announced the buybacks after months of being targeted for extracting fees outside the Solana ecosystem. A rough estimate saw Pump.fun produce around $1B in fees since inception, mostly coming from its peak altcoin season in the past year.
Are PUMP buybacks increasing value?
Despite the regular buybacks, PUMP tokens are still hovering close to their lower range. Buybacks practically burn all the fees from meme token generation and trading, but some are skeptical that the value returns to the community.
PUMP still trades at $0.0027, down by 54.7% in the past three months. Additionally, Pump.fun produces slightly lower fees, and cannot buy enough PUMP to sway the markets. The community has set up criticism that Pump.fun has failed to use its SOL reserves properly, and has sold them for PUMP instead of staking. Even with the buybacks, many PUMP holders are underwater, and do not receive any additional benefits or profit-sharing.
PUMP open interest is also near an all-time low at $183M, with around 60% in long positions. On Hyperliquid, around 51% of traders are long, with more attempts at betting on another price drop for PUMP.
The token has also mostly crashed to liquidate long positions, and has not performed a short squeeze. Only 10 Hyperliquid whales have taken positions with the token.
PUMP reflects the slowing activity of meme trenches
Pump.fun has switched to decentralized trading after its daily fees from new token generation decreased. The DEX has been making up for the difference, but still cannot catch up with the peak revenues during meme season.
Pump.fun and its PumpSwap DEX still produce $2.7M in daily fees, and are among the top 5 fee producing apps. The daily fees are keeping up with a high baseline, although Pump.fun has slowed down its token production and graduations.
On Solana, meme token trading has also shifted, making up just 5% of volumes. DEX have switched to trading wrapped assets, stablecoins, and legacy memes. Newly launched memes and older tokens make up around 5% of Solana DEX volumes, down from over 80% during peak times.
