Popular Solana token launchpad Pump.fun debuted its token on Monday, immediately entering the top 65 tokens by market cap. It followed a massive $600 million initial coin offering, or ICO, that sold out in just 12 minutes over the weekend.
Still, PUMP remains below BONK in terms of market cap, a meme coin project that is butting heads with Pump.fun as it steals Solana launchpad market share.
At the time of writing, Pump.fun sits at a market capitalization of $2 billion, according to CoinGecko, making it the 63rd largest cryptocurrency. To put that into perspective, that puts the project above the official meme coin for U.S. President Donald Trump and Sam Altman’s World, formerly known as Worldcoin.
But rival project BONK is currently trading at a market cap of $2.23 billion—$230 million ahead of PUMP. To be clear, BONK launched as a Solana meme coin in late 2022. By January, it had started to pick up steam, slid, and then pumped as the developers burned 5 trillion coins to buoy the price.
The team and community that created Bonk have gone on to create a Telegram trading tool BonkBot, a dog charity Buddies for Paws, and more. Meme coin launchpad LetsBonk, which debuted in April, is the latest of those projects.
Last week, LetsBonk flipped Pump.fun in daily created tokens and has remained on top for seven out of the last eight days, according to Dune data. The launchpad was created by the Bonk meme coin community, hence its shared name with the token.
LetsBonk is very similar to Pump.fun in that it allows anyone to quickly launch tokens for free. However, LetsBonk also lets the deployer control the total token supply and is underpinned by Raydium’s LaunchLab infrastructure.
Comparing the PUMP and BONK tokens isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison, as the team behind the OG Solana meme coin has a wider catalogue of offerings. Bonk is integrated into dozens of DeFi projects, games, and dev tools, and even has its own stadium sponsorship. Whereas PUMP—which is a token and not a meme coin—is solely focused on Pump.fun.
That said, Pump.fun is undeniably one of the largest crypto projects to emerge in recent years, becoming the fastest crypto company to hit $100 million in revenue last year. Since then, it has topped $784 million in revenue, according to Dune data.
The platform allows anyone to create a Solana token in less than a minute, free of charge. It has resulted in more than 11.89 million tokens being created since its January 2024 launch, many of which have been viral successes—think Moo Deng, Fartcoin, and Chill Guy.
More recently, the project has invested more into expanding its streamer ecosystem by funding big streamer projects and paying users to post viral clips of their favorite Pump.fun creators.
Those bullish on PUMP are now eagerly awaiting details on when the launchpad will airdrop tokens to users of the platform. In its tokenomics, 24% of the supply was dedicated to “Community & Ecosystem initiatives,” which many believe suggests an airdrop is on its way. Predictors on Myriad Markets believe there is a 47.7% chance that Pump.fun airdrops by the end of July.
Pump.fun declined to respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.
(Disclosure: Myriad is a prediction market developed by Decrypt’s parent company DASTAN.)
What happened on launch day?
Throughout its first day of trading, PUMP has remained fairly stable, hitting a low of $0.0049, a high of $0.0061, and is currently sitting at $0.0055. At its peak, it was trading at a 65% premium over its ICO price of $.004.
According to Dune data, this prompted 21.6% of ICO participants to sell the token via decentralized exchanges and 43.4% to transfer it out of their wallets. It’s worth noting that transferring tokens does not mean that the trader sold the tokens; moving tokens could simply mean splitting tokens among wallets.
Plus, 31.8% of public sale buyers have held their tokens, with 3.2% even acquiring more tokens post-launch.
Due to its lack of volatility, there doesn’t appear to be any big winners trading PUMP yet with the top traders, according to DEX Screener, requiring millions of dollars to make sizable profits.
As you can expect, a stream of knock-off coins were launched alongside PUMP, including the Official Pump—which is very much not official. It peaked at a $3.13 million market cap and has since crashed 74.75%.
