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- [00:00]
A
Alan I think some listeners, maybe, maybe most listeners will see the title of this episode when they, when they clicked on it and they'll say like, oh wow, Pump Fun on Bankless. That is a weird combo. Why Bankless? Of all the podcasts that are out there, there are more like Solana interested podcasts. There's, you know, there's plenty of options. Why Bankless? Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of Internet money and Internet finance. Today on the show, I'm hosting a conversation with Alon, a co founder of Pumpfun, the Meme Coin launchpad on Solana. The idea of Pumpfun being on Bankless is probably already surprising to many listeners. Bankless has not necessarily been the strongest advocate of Meme Coins, mainly due to their inert nature and destructive market behavior that Meme Coins tends to create. I did my best in this interview to give Alan both a fair shot at explaining what he sees in Meme Coins, while also not ignoring the reality that Pump Fun has been at the forefront of one of our industry's most extravagant active market cycles, leaving behind it a trail of destroyed capital as what started out as a relatively innocent meta of fun speculation turned into structural and systematized extraction into the hands of just a few players. I went into this interview with Ellen cautiously. I'd never met the guy before, and I'm wary of the idea of platforming a project that might just inherently be stuck in creating only toxic outcomes for its users. I'm also wary of the idea that Pump Fund might be attempting to use Bankless to launder its reputation and as it tries to turn a page with its product offerings. With the recent introduction of Pump Swap, an AMM Dex on Solana during this interview, I also couldn't get the idea of Operation Berkshire out of my head. For those that don't know, Operation Berkshire was a conspiracy by Big Tobacco to publicly deny the existence of health risks associated with smoking and also fund pro tobacco research and generally undermine scientific consensus about tobacco. The tobacco industry tried to influence policy and public opinion through front groups and media campaigns in pursuit of market growth by their industry. There is a chance that Meme Coins are inherently stuck being something like tobacco for public health. I think anyone working on Pump Fun is incentivized to not think that this is the case, but we are in the early days of crypto and we are still in the early days of Meme Coins. The future is not yet written. There is a possible future out there for Meme Coins that are more productive and Meme coins, at the end of the day, are just a logical conclusion of what crypto brings to humanity the permissionless ability to create a financial asset. So whether we like them or not, whether they represent a scourge on public health or the beginnings of a more equitable future, this will be determined by the leaders of the meme coin industry. And with that preamble out of the way, let's go ahead and get right into the conversation with Alan from Pump Fun. But first, a message from some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible in the Wild west of Defi Stipulate, mobility and innovation are everything. Which is why you should check out FRAX Finance, the protocol revolutionizing stablecoins, DeFi and Rolex. The core of FRAX finance is Frax USD, which is backed by BlackRock's Institutional Biddle Fund. Frax designed Frax USD for best in class yields across Defi T bills and carry trade returns all in one. Just head to frax.com, then stake it to earn some of the best yields in DeFi. Want even more? 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From immersed role playing games, fast paced fantasy MMOs to casual luck battle mobile games. Move assets effortlessly between chains and access the ecosystem with ease via Arbitrum's expansive network of bridges and on ramps. Step into Arbitrum's flourishing NFT and creator space where artists, collectors and social converge and support your favorite streamers all on chain. Find new and trending apps and Learn how to earn rewards across the Arbitrum ecosystem with limited time campaigns from your favorite projects. Empower your future with Arbitrum. Visit Portal Arbitrum IO to find out what's next on your web 3 Journey Introducing Unichain Built for Defi and powered by Uniswap, Unichain is the fast, decentralized Layer two designed to tackle blockchain speed and cost challenges. With this mainnet now live, you can enjoy transactions that up to 95% cheaper than the ETH layer one, all while benefiting from an impressive one second block time that will be getting even faster very soon. Unichain is the first Layer two to launch as a Stage one rollup on Day one. That means it comes with a fully functional permissionless proof system from the start. Increasing transparency, further decentralizing the chain. More than 80 apps are joining the Uni Chain community including Coinbase, Circle, Lido, Morpho and Uniswap. You'll be able to bridge, swap, borrow and lend and launch new assets and more from day one. Built by Uniswap Labs, the team behind the protocol that's processed over 2.75 trillion in all time volume with zero hacks. Unichain truly enhances Defi experiences with faster, cheaper and seamless transactions even across chains. And soon the Unichain validation network will allow anyone to run a node and earn by securing the network. Visit uniswap.org and swap on Unichain today. Bankless Nation Excited to introduce you to Alan. He is the co founder of Pump Fun. Pump Fun by now I don't think needs any introduction. It's the token launchpad on Solana, primarily known for launching Meme Coins at its peak, over 60,000 tokens were being launched on Pump Fun per day back in January. I think today we are somewhere near 9 million total tokens that have ever been launched on the Pump Fund platform since its launch in in January of 2024. With about 15 million unique addresses interacting with the Pump Fund tokens. Pump Fund charges a 1% fee on all trades that go through its bonding curve model which has generated Pump fund an astounding $600 million of revenue to pump the company and its investors, making it one of the most wildly successful applications in the crypto space in recent times. Alon welcome to Bankless.
- [06:39]
B
Thanks for having me David. Really excited to to chat about Pump Fun Meme Coins. Anything that we want to discuss, especially addressing your audience, is a major privilege. So you know, thanks again.
- [06:50]
A
I think like I said, people understand Pump Fun and also by the way, Pump Fun or Pump Fun.
- [06:57]
B
Yeah, I've been struggling with that myself. I love Pump Fun at first, but I think the users like saying Pump Fun so you got to go with, with what's organic, with what people are saying out there. So I say Pump Fun these days.
- [07:09]
A
Okay, Pump Fun. Maybe you can just give a little bit of color to your genesis, your background pre Pump Fun and then just start the conversation off with like the idea inception of Pump Fun in the first place.
- [07:23]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So as for myself and my two co founders as well, we've been in the space for a while. I think all of us have gone through the space by being retail traders getting into the space, buying bitcoin and ETH and Doge and stuff like that. I think we got more and more into it over the years. Ultimately we worked on a few different projects. Myself personally I was quite deeply involved with a project called NFT Prep, which is a futures exchange for NFTs on Arbitrum back in the day. So we're quite involved on the, you know, on the defi side of things. Was very exciting. We obviously saw that there is something to it and something to, you know, I mean so for, for NFT perp specifically we saw the product market fit that collectibles trading could have. And after experiencing Terra Luna, after experiencing ftx, we saw that the market was kind of going down and that NFTs might not have the longevity that we thought they would have. So we wanted to experiment with some new ideas. So I quit that role and started experimenting with my, who are to become my two co founders with a bunch of different ideas that we had in the space. We're actually mainly building on ethereum or it's L2S. You know, few people know this, so we've actually come from that, you know, from the ETH ecosystem, just building different things. Started off in NFTs, you know, built some stuff in social fi, got traction for basically nothing. I would say we were chewing glass for like for at least a year for one of my co founders would say even for longer, like two plus years. Just really iterating, shipping, building MVPs for things that, that we thought people would want. Honestly when we got started we weren't that good at it. We were building stuff that we thought was cool or we thought that we saw that there was going to be a trend in the market and we were building for what we thought would work in a few years time, but we weren't actually building for users today. We weren't actually speaking to users properly and actually building something that solved their problems today. So as we iterated, as we tried more and more things, we, you know, we got better at our craft. But the problem was that we were building problem spaces that we didn't understand. I think, you know, one idea that we built, we built like we were trying to build this creator fundraising marketplace. We're not, you know, natively, we're not, we're not, you know, content creators. What we've done, what got us into crypto was trading on chain trading. NFTs, you know, buying NFTs, minting NFTs, buying meme coins on chain, whether it's Ethereum or Binance, smart chain or whatever. And ultimately when we saw people starting to trade meme coins on Solana, so in particular, in particular bonk with all these kinds of assets, we thought that that was interesting. I mean, look, we were, we were actually quite hesitant to go to Solana because we never used it before. We were really comfortable, you know, building on. On Ethan. I think our last project was before moving over was on base. Developing on. On Solana back then was kind of a pain. Like we weren't really looking forward to it. But look, we were, we were quite desperate at that point and we wanted to get users and the users were there, so that's where we were going. Like, from my perspective or from the perspective of my co founders as well, I'm sure they'll say the same thing. If the users were on Cardano, like we would go to Cardano to go and build their product, like whatever it takes. So we saw that it was on Solana. We started experimenting or, you know, experimenting with the products there. We did see the potential of what was taking place. There's clearly a lot of excitement. Like we felt like we were at the beginning of a new wave. You know, the fact that transactions were landing super smoothly, super fast. We enjoyed using Fantom, you know, trading on chain trading on Jupiter, for instance, and so on. But we noticed that there were some major issues with the market structure, with the way that people were actually exploring coins, the way they were creating them, and ultimately what they were trading. One thing that was very popular back then was people conducting pre sales for meme coins, right? They were, they. They posted a wallet address on, on Twitter or whatnot and people were sending funds there. We saw that there a lot of people were just sending their, you know, their soul to, to these pre sales and half the time, you know, the, the coin was even launched. It was a Total shit show. There's no standardization whatsoever and people didn't know what to expect. And even when it did go well, the, the people that created these, these coins were, you know, they reserved like 50% of the raised funds to marketing, which is like, you know, excuse my language. It's total, you know, you don't need like millions of dollars to, to market your, your Meme coin. So it didn't make, none of that made any sense. At the same time, you know, it was really painful. Trading on, on AMMs or indexes, whatever you want to call them, getting liquidity pulled from those, from LPs, buying honey pots. Buying coins that drained your entire wallet is a really brutal experience. And one experience that, you know, in the Ethereum ecosystem that I particularly looked very fondly upon was friend tech. Like, I really love that idea. I think, I mean, there's a deeper conversation behind that about, you know, how it ended up playing out and if it was mismanaged or whatnot. But I loved, loved, loved the idea of being able to bootstrap small token communities with no need to actually commit capital upfront. Just coming up with an idea or. Yeah, just coming up with an idea or anything and being able to bootstrap a bootstrap liquidity for that using bonding curves. So ultimately the model that we came up with is you don't need to come commit capital upfront to create a coin whenever enough people or whatever the market suggests that it's successful enough. Whenever enough capital or cash was committed, the liquidity in the bonding curve was going to be used to create a liquidity pool which is burned. And whenever that that coin has created, all permissions and all that kind of stuff was revoked from the coin creator. So it was truly, you know, once it was created, it was truly permissionless, truly immutable. You can't tamper with it. And whenever we released that to market, we very quickly noticed that it will work. It took us a while to make it work, but we, we were very much, you know, we were very optimistic about the prospects of the product. Mm.
- [13:48]
A
This is actually triggering a memory for me about the pre pump era. Maybe, maybe this is most. The exemplar example of this is this Slurf incident where we had this one Solana developer who like publicized like I'm doing a pre sale for my Meme coin that I'm going to launch. There's no pump fun platform to do that. And so this would you just send your money to this trusted individual who would manage it and then launch A meme coin. Add the soul to a, to an LP position and then that's how the meme coin would launch. And then slurf this one incident, he accidentally burned the LP token because he didn't really know what he was doing. And there's that famous, the famous like tweet or something. It says, guys, I think I accidentally burned it or I'm so fucking sorry. And so I think this is kind of like illustrating the pre market structure that existed in the meme coin space before Pump came and just offered a, like a commoditized platform for just doing like not, not regulated, but like regulating the market by producing a standard for meme coins to launch. Then pump it up, fund launches. We don't have to do this whole like trust an influencer, trust an individual to create the meme coin. You can just launch it and launch it on Pump. Fun post launch in January of 2024. How long did it take to gain traction? Was it pretty immediate? When was there this like, oh, what, we just built something crazy? How long did that take for to really have that realization in the pump ecosystem?
- [15:15]
B
Yeah, I think when we first built the idea, before it was even shipped, we were, you know, as I mentioned, I think we were extremely bullish on the idea because we're familiar. Like unlike all the other products that we built, we actually, you know, we actually lived and breathed this, this ecosystem. We, I think we understood the significance of lowering the barrier to entry a thousand X. Like you used to need, you know, a few thousand dollars in liquidity to make a coin even worthwhile. Like you could obviously seed an LP with $50, but no one's gonna fucking, you know, no one's gonna buy that, right? So we were confident about it at first. You know, we shipped an MVP super quickly and again, excuse my language, but it was a piece of shit. It was really bad. Like it was very clunky. It was not like we just wanted to build our product super quickly to validate whether this was even worth building in the first place. And we, we brought it out. People were super excited about it. It wasn't like a ton of people, but a lot of people were, a lot of people saw it and there we then we noticed, like, this is worthwhile building. It gave us a ton of conviction and it also gave us the signals of like, hey, what, what are the issues on the platform? What do we need to improve to have a chance in this market? So we iterated on the product and then meanwhile, the problem that we had is you know, Pump Fund is a marketplace, right? It connects coin creators and buyers of coins. I mean, at that time, again, I mean, mainly meme coins, but it could be other stuff as well. You create this marketplace, you have, you face this cold start problem because everyone is trading on other marketplaces, other exchanges, whatever you want to call it, getting them over to whatever it is that, that you're building is a major challenge. You need to appeal to both sides of the coin. And you know, whenever someone buys a coin, they expect there to be some volume, they expect there to be some excitement, right? Because otherwise there's no product. So what that actually came down to was not, we know, we never paid any influencers. We didn't have the money to. We had like, I think we had like 100 grand to our name. We had nothing to actually use to pay people. So there was no influencers. We didn't do anything that many other projects usually resort to. All we did was just cold message users and speak to them. So I personally message over 3,000 people to just get the idea out there. It wasn't just like copy paste spam. I think that's a really bad way to go about it. If you're a builder. The way to go about it is actually having conversations with people, like just saying hi, saying what's up? You don't have to overcomplicate it. We just went in there, spoke to them about, you know, everyone likes showing their coins. We asked them to show their coins, you know, like, what, what are they trading and why? And ultimately it was a good way to also get some feedback about what they think about the market. Right. It helped us build a really, really sophisticated view of what was going on in the, in the trenches in those days. And ultimately, after you build up that, that rapport, you can actually, you know, be like, hey, I'm building this thing, come check it out. And most people, you know, at first I had like 200 followers. People thought I was a bot. I was getting blocked left, right and center. But after a while, people start noticing. People start listening out, you know, hearing you out. And ultimately after I think two months of, of this, of iterating, we even shipped a version of PumpFun to blast the Ethereum layer 2, but that didn't work. So we tried a whole bunch of stuff on the product side. But ultimately what it took was, you know, refining the product, making it kind of good enough, but also just showing it to enough people. And I think it was exactly a year ago when we really knew, like we had product market fit on our hands when I think it was like two, you know, I guess like micro influencers that launched their own coins. Like again we didn't pay them, we didn't, we had no idea that they were going to launch their coins but they just did it because they thought the product was cool and they, you know, they created the coins, they posted them and from then on out people really experimenting with it. It was an, it was an amazing feeling. It's probably the best feeling like I've had over the past couple of years. Just waking up and every single day you're reaching an all time high in volumes. Even when Pump Fund ended up being super successful later, later on, that feeling of actually getting product market fit after trying for so long, like there's nothing better than that.
- [19:10]
A
I want to zoom forward to this current day because I think the arc of pumped up fun is still pretty fresh in people's memory. So coming to where we are today in March 2025, the meme coin sector has created just an immense amount of pain for the crypto industry as a whole. Like broadly every like meme coins are in like the common vernacular kind of in the, in the same way that like monkey jpegs were in 2021. And as a, as a result of some of the biggest meme coins that have launched crypto reputation around. Crypto is I think perhaps the worst that it's ever been in mainstream maybe, maybe since ftx. Just like because of this structural and systematized extraction, the tarnished reputation like a deep delegitimizing of the seriousness of the industry. Now Pump Fund did not of course create the meme coin sector. The meme coin sector came long before and it'll go back to Dogecoin for example as like the first meme coin. But Pumpfund does, did really have a very critical role and just the expansion of the meme coin sector from just a niche corner of crypto to crypto's number one use case in the current era. Can you just reflect on Pump Fund's role in this part of the crypto meta in this part of crypto's history?
- [20:23]
B
Yeah, I'm glad you asked this question. I think as you mentioned the market has existed for a long time. I think meme coins have existed for 10 plus years. They have evolved in many different forms. So you had, I would argue a lot of ICOs were kind of like meme coins. I think a lot of defi. The food coins were kind of like meme coins. NFTs pretty much meme Coins. I mean people were trading culture, it's very, and building communities around these ideas. I would say that's very similar to Meme Coins. And people are also trading Meme Coins on Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain, last cycle on Solana as well, to a small extent as well. And now today people trading Solana Meme coins. I do agree that, you know, Pump Fund had a significant role in expanding the ecosystem by just again making it a lot simpler for people to, to take part and creating that baseline security that is required to act to, you know, to make that happen. But at the end of the day, I don't think that Meme Coins are at fault for, you know, crypto existing for over 15 years. And I think a lot of people share this feeling that not much has been provided. I think that is just a fact of the market. That's not because people like to trade silly meme coins. I think it's because people have failed to come up with compelling use cases for users. I very strongly disagree with the fact that, you know, Pump Fund killed Alt season or whatnot. You know, if you create a layer 2 chain or an L1 a few years ago and you fail to get any semblance of traction, any users, any product market fit, and your token is trading at a $5 billion market cap, at a $2 billion market cap, and you're going to these conferences and you're promising people that you're going to build the future of finance. Obviously people are going to be pissed off when they're down, you know, they're, they're down a lot of money. And honestly we should, we should expect a lot of these things to transpire because again, it's been 15 years. Now is the time to get results. And I think the projects that do end up getting results have been incredibly successful. You know, Hyper Liquid, for example, is a perfect example. They've managed to create a great product. A lot of users are so passionate about it, it's insane to see. And they have a token that was equitably distributed as well and people were able to rally behind that and it ended up being very successful. Went up over like 10 15x from the moment that it launched. So I think that is proof that there is so much demand for altcoins out there. There's so much demand for projects that actually deliver utility, whether that is, you know, in speculative use cases or non speculative use cases, but there just aren't that many out there. And I think the reason for that is so many people have been building infrastructure for so long. People need to build stuff. At the end of the day, the infrastructure doesn't matter if there's no one using it. People need. I think we need 10x more app builders than infrastructure builders. And I know I'm echoing a lot of what thought leaders have been saying for quite some time now, But I think PumpFun is a great example of that, of how you just build a product. A lot of people come and then they actually battle test your infrastructure. Like Solana, which has improved significantly over the past year.
- [23:26]
A
I think it's the common pattern in crypto arcs. Crypto like token arcs going back to even 2017 where, like, why did the 2017 ICO meta happen? Well, the Ethereum ICO was incredibly successful and then followed up by the augur ico, two extremely legitimate projects that really put their best foot forward did ICOs, raised money and then started to build a project and then that meta started, started to spiral out of control and ended up with just absolutely ridiculous vaporware ICOs which like were, to your point, just straight memes and then you can kind of copy and paste. This is just the classic euthanasia roller coaster metaphor of all crypto token cycles. Something very real kicks off a cycle. Like in defi summer, the compound governance token is launched and then, you know, 17 dominoes later, 17 loops on the roller coaster later, we're at like 10,000% APY food farms. Same thing with NFTs. And then I think the same thing happened with meme coins where we had some like, truly original, fair, equitable meme coins get launched and then we spiral out into just the most extractive meta that I think people say, like, we all have recency bias, but I think the common perception is that the meme coin meta was one of the most extractives that we've ever seen in crypto. If you were to go back into Pump Fund's beginnings, would there be any, like, design considerations, design constructions that you would have done differently to help incentivize or encourage, like not spiraling out or was there anything like you feel or is that kind of just do you feel like out of your control?
- [24:56]
B
Yeah, a few things there. I do feel like, you know, the market is this almighty beast. And at the end of the day, if, if that's the nature of crypto, there's, you know, there's not much you can do about when there's an insane, you know, when there's insane levels of euphoria in the market, ultimately Things do play out in similar ways over time. But I would, I would definitely agree that there are better, you know, there are improvements to be made on the mechanism. I mean, yesterday we launched Pump Swap, right? Exactly. Because we wanted to improve the mechanism. I think a major point of improvement was that incentive alignment between coin creators as well as, you know, holders, traders. Creator revenue sharing is not live on, on Punk Swap today, but when it is, it is going to allow creators to actually, you know, so when, when they actually earn some of the swap volumes on Pump Swap, whenever the coin succeeds, they will actually have a strong incentive to not necessarily, you know, I guess, sell on top of their holders or whatnot, but rather keep their coin in the news, keep it relevant for as long as possible. And I think that is a more sustainable model. I think one worry that I had that might have been a little bit, might have been a bit of a mid curve was I remember those discussions around royalties when NFTs were really big and I think those were actually quite extractive. But it was the complete other side of the spectrum that the fees were just so high that people wanted to get around them so desperately. I think there's probably some middle ground to be reached and I think that's why we released Pump Swap in the first place. We want to actually come around and, and find a better mechanism out there. But yeah, again, I think the nature of crypto is that, or again, with a lot of these speculative use cases or tokens generally because they can be used for speculative use cases, they can start off with something very pure, but eventually, as people want to explore how far they can take, can trend in some awful directions. And I think Libra, for instance, is, is a, is a good example of that. I mean it was, it was insane, truly insane what, what transpired there. And I think it's, again, it's funny because it's the exact reason why Pump Funnel is built in the first place. The fact that you need these middlemen to, to kind of to conduct these token launches is ridiculous. Like, you know, besides the fact that Libra might not even have been like an actual meme coin, if you launch a meme coin, you don't need a market maker. I mean, this is silly, right? You know, if you're creating something around a simple idea, you don't need these middlemen. And I think that is one part of many, many fucked up things that transpired during that Libra saga that we really want to leave behind. And if there's a new chapter, if a new chapter for Meme Coins takes place and if the mechanism needs to change to become more sustainable, we're all for it. Because I'm not here to build something that is like a 12 year product and ends up failing or disappearing into into a relevancy. I think, you know, as successful as PumpFun has been, if it's not around next cycle or in the next couple years, it was a failure. My one goal every single day when I wake up is how do we make this product more sustainable? How do we make it so people, you know, actually come back and feel like they have gained value by interacting with a protocol or with the app. So that is, that's what we're looking to achieve.
- [28:33]
A
My initial like relationship with Meme Coins was definitely like resistant to them generally speaking simply because of their like inert nature. They seem to just embody this level of not, not. We're not, not here to build anything. We're here to like trade a cartoon and there we're not going to produce any net new gdp. We're not going to try and build and build anything. It's just we're going to have this like inert nihilist like speculative asset. And my mind has since kind of come around not all the way down to just like, not like trading it Nihilists and your assets is fun but to the idea that you can layer on additional alignment mechanisms into Meme Coins that allow Meme Coins to actually grow into something more sustainable. And I definitely want to talk about that because that is what is coming down the pipe in this conversation with a pump swap feature AMM that you guys are have recently announced. And I think that can hopefully is a much more productive nature of Meme Coins because I do think that one of the greatest powers that crypto brings to the table is it allows the access to financial assets to the common man. Where previously the creation of a financial asset was impossible by the public, by the individual, before Bitcoin and then really what, what Bitcoin was, it was the first asset to ever be created outside of the the like law of the nation state. And then ever since then the arc of crypto has been to make that, that acts access to asset creation easier and easier and easier. And I kind of see pumped up on is like the logical conclusion of that. Especially when you see like well pumped off on made mine 9 million tokens in a year. 9 million financial assets. And so yeah, I think this conversation continues with okay, well now how do we turn these inert financial assets into sustainable Businesses, how do we, like, actually add them to economic growth? But I want to put a pin in this conversation because I still kind of want to go through the kind of, like, the cultural arc of Pump Fun. So, like, to return to that initial conversation, Pump Fun seems to have this, like, 4chan esthetic and 4chan energy. Can you just talk about that choice to make Pump Fun just look and feel like 4chan?
- [30:40]
B
Yeah, of course. I think in the early days, you know, when we first built the mvp, it was, you know, to admit it wasn't. It was a practical choice as well, because it was easy to build. We just wanted to ship something out the door super quickly. But I think we iterated on that and we decided to stick with it because we. I mean, again, this decision was made because of inert user behavior, like innate user behavior. People were, you know, the best Meme coins used to originate on 4chan, especially, you know, a lot of the ones that actually launched on Ethereum. They launched on some of these forms in 4chan, and a lot of our users really, you know, really resonated with them. So we stuck with it ever since. Obviously, you know, the product needed to improve a lot when it came to, like, user experience and so on. But I think retaining that rich culture that paying our respects to, kind of where all this really kicked off is, I think, a really big part of what sets Pump apart from so many other projects that feel lifeless, that don't feel like there's anything culturally meaningful behind them. I think that is one part that, you know, even if, I mean, even if the goal is to scale this product to 10 million daily active users, you still want to retain that rich culture. Because if that is lost, then it just becomes another Web2 product. And we don't want. We don't want it to become that.
- [31:57]
A
I think some people would throw a flag at the idea that 4chan culture is rich culture. I am not really a 4chan expert, but my understanding of 4chan is that this is the butthole of the Internet where just like racism and like, just generally nefarious behavior is found. And I don't want to homogenize, but it's like kind of just like a wild west, lawless part of the Internet. And I think we are in 2025 crypto kind of understanding that culture is really set from the top in all of these ecosystems, decentralized or otherwise. Otherwise, like, why is Ethereum the way that it is? Well, it's. That culture is downstream of Ethereum leadership, and same thing for Solana. And I'll contend that that same thing happens on Pump Fun. And so I think some of the behavior you see coming out of Pump Fun is not. Is highly related to the choice of making Pump Fun look and behave and feel a particular way. And I think if we, if we are looking to have like a new chapter of Meme coins that have more sustainability, more fairness, more. Less nefarious behavior, I would, I will, I will throw to you the idea that maybe the 4chan branding has something to do with that. Do you accept that premise or do you reject that?
- [33:16]
B
I accept the general premise. I don't necessarily believe that that design choice is obstructs us from actually being able to, to. To not necessarily change the culture, but improve on, on many of its aspects. I think there's many more. There's far more important conversations to be have. I think moderation is extremely important. I think a big reason why a lot of people, especially in the Ethereum ecosystem, find Pump Fund the space for, even hate it is because of the events that transpired in last November with the live streams. I want to say very clearly that we fucked up there. Moderation was in place on Pumpfund from day one. You know, live streaming came about in June of 2024. We saw a lot of people live streaming with their coins. It was just super exciting. It was very, this very harmless kind of user behavior that we saw. Like, hey, if we, if we built this in house, this would be so much fun. I mean, people would be. It would be much easier for people to actually hop on and talk about their coin and whatnot. But six months later, a lot of people were constantly questioning us, like, why are you building these things? Like, people. No one was using. No, a lot of people really ask us these questions because no one was using Live Stream. But then once the market really heated up in October, November, people started using it. And I think within a few days, like 2, 4, 5 days maybe, we went from 10 live streams a day, 10, 20 organic, like real live streams, to thousands of thousands. And bear in mind right before that, you know, Andrew Tate hopped on a live stream, was trading coins in the trenches, Photon was going down, pump fund was going down. Like the infrastructure was collapsing. And so, you know, when so much is happening at once, you know, crypto can be so insane. And I think one thing that I deeply regret is not being transparent enough about what we have done on the moderation side of things and that we even have a moderation guideline. Like, people don't even know that I Think to this day, some people think that it's unmoderated, which is just insane to me because we've been doing it for so long. And I think it also speaks to the fact that, you know, moderation was actually done well for. For a while because people actually, you know, for so long, they weren't seeing any things that they didn't want to see. But then, you know, when. When we were overwhelmed, it was. It was too much. And, you know, we should have been a lot more transparent again about what should be allowed and what. And what should be allowed and what shouldn't. And that's why I completely agree with you when. When you say that culture comes from the top down, and the culture that we set is we're not going to talk about moderation. And that implicitly means that you can kind of do whatever and you can just test the limits of what you can and cannot do, which was a huge mistake. A huge mistake. And I still regret that to this day. And if any more social features come in the future, we're going to make sure that we're going to very clearly communicate what is allowed, what isn't allowed, what's tolerated, what isn't tolerated. So I do generally agree with you. I don't think the 4chan aesthetic necessarily obstructs us in developing in a healthy way. I also believe that anything that's culturally relevant and actually anything that ever happened that was cool is somewhat controversial. And you're always exploring the, I guess, the boundaries of what's accepted and what isn't. Right. But there's a very clear line that is drawn, and we need to make sure that that line isn't. No one oversteps that line.
- [36:58]
A
I was definitely one of those people who didn't know at all that pump fun had any sort of moderation on it. And I think my general sentiment was like, well, how could you when there are 60,000 tokens being launched any given day? This was like, too much to moderate. Maybe you could kind of just shine a light about how that moderation system actually works. How do you actually moderate at scale? I know not all 60,000 tokens a day or however many were happening in that moment. Very few of them actually had a live stream. So maybe you can just share a little bit more about how that moderation system actually works.
- [37:32]
B
Yeah, no, I mean, at that point, I think it was even more than 60,000. I think at its peak, it was like 80,000 coins. It was insane. But yeah, just a few things to mention there. First of all, when a coin is launched, it is on chain, it is immutable. And that metadata, it lives on chain, right? Most people, the way they interact with that data is through a front end like Pump Fun or there's a few other sites that people use as well. I'm not sure if they're moderated, but, you know, Pump Fun commands a huge portion of the traffic, you know, of users that want to interact with these coins. The challenge of actually moderating, you know, a lot of these pieces of content is kind of like social media. You know, Obviously you have 60,000 coins a day, 80,000 coins a day. It's not easy, but it is, it is doable. Right? Social media platforms have tons and tons and tons of pieces of content going live every second. Obviously it's a very different when you have Twitter or it's mainly text based, but you have many other sites are out there that are, you know, the way they work is they have a lot of, you know, automated moderation, but they also have systems where, you know, people report pieces of content and then, then that's manually reviewed. The problem with Pump Fun is that and, and Meme coins generally is that people want to be early to these coins. And that's why people really like to scope, you know, have a look at all the coins that have been very recently launched, like launched a few seconds ago. And that gives you very little time to actually moderate properly. Because if you have, if you know that you have thousands, tens of thousands of people looking at newly created coins, you have milliseconds, you have, you'll, you have very little time to actually react. So the automated moderation systems need to be built out. They have been built out and you need to have, you know, significant resources put into manual moderation. People actually looking at these things coming in. So both of these have been in place for moderating the Pump Fund front end for a while. And again, it's not perfect because people also use other front ends. But such is the nature of, you know, permissionless platforms. People can use other front ends and if those platforms are unmoderated, then that's, that's probably not great.
- [39:41]
A
I do think that the elimination of the, the way I think about Meme coins today is what are the mechanisms that surround them that encourage good behavior, bad behavior, incentivize some sort of outcome? And I liked the example of the removal of the live stream feature, for better or for worse, as an example of that. There is a lever or a dial that Pump Fun has at its disposal to Create a different mechanism. And like, during. During that, like, live stream era where there were just some, like, completely ridiculous stuff. It all got started, I think, with a Gen Z quant thing who, like, dumped his stack on live stream, you know, gave the double bird, walked away saying thanks for the 20 bandos, which was hilarious. But that was the start of it. And then, and then it turned into something just like, completely ridiculous where there was like, crackhead dev who was smoking fentanyl on the live stream and then faked his own death. And then that was like, maybe starting to become like the worst of it. And then, and then you guys elected to remove the live stream future. And then all of that behavior that was in, like, that crazy stunting behavior was just neutered because now, now there's no way to express that kind of behavior. And to me, that is an example of like, okay, there are things that pump funk can do that like, points behavior in a particular way. And that is kind of like the power that you guys have. You guys have all the traffic, you guys have the users, you guys have the brand. Can you talk about, like, any other, like, mechanisms or like, ways you have thought about to. That can, like, play in this same arena of like, pointing users towards more sustainable outcomes?
- [41:16]
B
In permissionless systems, you have. It's very difficult to disincentivize, you know, bad behavior, like bad behavior on chain, you know, at the end of the day. Again, these are permissionless systems. Anyone can access them, people can try to take advantage of them. In many ways, it's the job of the social layer to really incentivize good behavior. And I think showing people that positive things can be done and rewarding that behavior. Because ultimately, I mean, meme coins are. I like to think of meme coins as like, you know, these, these attention units that you can trade and. And, you know, be early to, and speculate on and whatnot, because they're. They are so intertwined with how much attention you give them. If you give attention to things that are positive, you. You can definitely incentivize people to do more of the good stuff than the bad stuff. Again, the permissionless systems, it's virtually impossible to stop all bad behavior, but you can direct a lot of attention towards, you know, positive things. So I think some great examples of that. I think there are, you know, a lot of people look back at all the, you know, AI stuff, the AI coins in a negative light. I think a lot of it was people just trying to ride the wave. But I think there's. There are a ton of projects there that were actually building real products and they were actually very exciting. I think Griffin, for instance, was super exciting. You know, someone's just building this kind of chatgpt for, for, for interacting with, with the Solana blockchain. I think that's a super cool idea. And speaking to, to the, to the founder of it, he wasn't trying to just capitalize on the idea. I mean before he launched the coin, there was no idea, there was no attention, there wasn't that much attention directed towards it. He wanted to, to launch the coin, to get distribution, to get. Because he knew like there's hundreds of thousands of people trading these coins every single day. If you could create a coin that actually had a chance of gaining traction of succeeding, then people will see the product and people will use it and the rest is history. I think with, you know, most products fail, most products don't have product market fit. But being able to bootstrap attention for your idea is so inherent, it is so unequivocally positive that I wish to see more of it. And we will definitely make an effort to kind of reward, reward projects that elect this way as a way to garner attention for their ideas. I mean if when I was trying to, you know, when I, my co founders are trying to launch our product and building MVPs, you know, we would have, it would be great to have this opportunity to just launch a coin and you know instantly that your cold star problem is solved. You can very quickly test an idea. Right. I think that is, that is a very, it's extremely overlooked. I think one thing that is driving people away from that is again the reputational concerns and I completely sympathize with that. They don't want to be seen. Like I think a lot of people are scared that even if they don't profit from it, people will think that they profited from a coin in a malicious way and that's why they stay away from it. And I think that is why it's so key for us to explore these other avenues of monetization where platforms or coins or whatever it is that is launched can monetize without necessarily selling their tokens. I think that is very, very so again, that kind of drives the conversation back to trying to incentivize good behavior via the social layer and improving incentive alignment on the protocol level.
- [44:42]
A
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- [47:55]
B
I think ultimately, yeah, I spoke about this a little bit earlier. Permissionless systems, it's super easy to switch compared to, you know, if you Compare it to Web2 or traditional finance or whatnot. So I would attribute that to the product just being better, really listening to users day in and day out and trying to iterate and bring, you know, bring features to the market that users actually love. You know, we welcome competition at the end of the day that's good for the end user. We always monitor the market. I think there are some really, really good, you know, we have some competition out there that, you know, while they may not have ton of attraction, I think they have really good ideas and there's a lot of exciting stuff out there and ultimately the best product wins no matter what. So we feel like if we're able to continue to iterate, then you know, the ball is going to end up in our court and you know, the market has spoken over the past year or so. So I think it's, it's really straightforward in that regard.
- [48:51]
A
Okay, Alan, I think this will be my last question before we get into the Pump Swap product release that you guys have just recently announced. But I don't, I, I don't think that this is a fair question because people's money and their businesses and the profits of their businesses is their business. But I think people are just going to expect me to ask this question no matter what. Something like $600 million has been accrued by the pump fund platform going to either the team, the investors, or some combo of the both. What is that money being used for? $600 million, I think, I don't know where that ranks in terms of profitability of crypto projects, but it's definitely up there. Especially for projects launched in 2024. Where's the money gone?
- [49:31]
B
All of it has been reinvested into creating a better product. So whether that is in hiring a team, growing the Devco, you know, we have around 50, 45, 50 people at this stage. Just like six months ago, we were like under 20, mainly consistent of engineers, but we have data scientists, machine learning engineers, security people. And it's continuing to grow day by day to just deliver the best product to the end use or you're not
- [49:58]
A
ever going to distribute anything to investors. You guys had one seed round, right?
- [50:02]
B
Yeah. So Pump Fun or I guess, you know, in our early days we did take on a little bit of investment. It's not fully bootstrapped. I think, you know, at some, at some point you want to enjoy the fruits of your labor for sure. But as mentioned, you know, I don't wake up every single day thinking about, you know, what's already been done. We're looking forward and seeing how can we create product that actually survives multiple cycles. Like I, I, I can't tell you how devastating it would be to sit here and be like, you know, a few years later and be like, it was a one cycle phenomenon that would just, I don't, I don't know, I think that would be, you know, kind of pathetic.
- [50:38]
A
How big is the pump team? I would imagine you guys have hired quite a lot because you've also like started to ship new products, right?
- [50:44]
B
Yeah. Again, as, as mentioned, the Devco has like 45, 50 people at this stage. Yeah, again, mainly engineers, but we have a whole bunch of people doing a whole bunch of things. It's exciting.
- [50:53]
A
Okay. And then one of the, the new products, I think this is product number two is Pump Swap, the native dex for Pump Fun. Now I think this is causing a bunch of trauma, a bunch of reorgang in the Solana ecosystem. Because the way that Pump Fun worked previously was any meme coin that hit a certain amount of market cap would graduate to radium. Now Radium is an AMM on Solana. I don't know if it's fair to call it like the uniswap of Solana, but we're talking about that same kind of piece of technology, but inside of the Solana ecosystem. And so as any pump fund coin got into a sufficiently high market cap, it would graduate to radium and then it would become part of the radium ecosystem, and then radium would start to accrue a ton of fees. And so due to pump fund's success, radium also saw a ton of success simply because there's just more total trading volume happening on Solana. And you kind of saw that. Pump fund really, I think, was the tide that lifted all boats in the Solana ecosystem all the way up to like the sole asset itself. Right? Like, why did Donald Trump launch a meme coin on Solana? Well, I'm going to go ahead and say that's because pump fun started the meme coin, like, revolution on Solana. And so like, radium saw increased volumes. The radium token saw incredible price action. And now you guys are launching pump swap, which is going to be pumped up pump funds like native Dex. And so you guys are swapping out radium for your own native AMM to verticalize. So the pump ecosystem is just becoming more vertical. That's how I understand what's going on here. Maybe you can correct me if I'm. If you want to correct any of those details, but talk to me about pump swap and the strategy and vision behind it.
- [52:33]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So pump swap, again, pump state of decks. The main reason for that. I think there's two main reasons for, for launching pump swap and why that actually adds a ton of value to the end user. One, you know, it's still too complicated to trade on chain. I think we are really obsessed with the idea of creating the simplest on chain experience, the simplest on chain experience that actually brings you value and brings joy to, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of people needing to know what a migration is, needing to know what a bonding curve is or an AMM and how they work, that you shouldn't need to understand these concepts to get involved in a really basic level. I think you need to understand the risks of getting involved in trading meme coins. I think that is very key and I think that's a lot more intuitive for people to grasp than these technical terms and things that shouldn't really exist. The only thing that people should be really worrying about when trading meme coins is like, is this funny or Any token does this provide value to myself or to other people? Right. It really shouldn't be these abstract concepts. So removing that need for, I guess, I mean, there are still migrations, but making them super simple, making them take place instantly and also remove any friction involved. There is something that we've wanted to do for a very long time. So one thing that we did is we slashed the fee that pump fund took upon migration. So however many migrations take place per day, around 6 Solana is taken from the bonding curve whenever the token gets to that migration threshold. Historically that 6 Solana was extra. And just to provide a little bit of context, the bonding curve kind of gets completed whenever 85 Solana is reached. Right. So 6 Solana from that 85 has been taken as a fee. Historically that was used to actually create the liquidity pool, pay GTO tips and whatnot to actually get the migration to land on chain. And the rest of it gets taken as revenue that was slashed completely. So that's zero now and again, it's just to reduce the friction. I think as the protocol, you also want to be aligned with the user base. And I think that's what the marketplace model is really good at doing. You take a small transaction fee and whenever tokens succeed, whenever they actually become sustainable, you have a really, really good, stable source of revenue. And I think that is much preferable to fees where it may affect the end user experience. So that is one side of pump swap. I think another aspect, I think we already spoke about this at length, is the notion of aligning coin creators and holders. I don't know if I need to dive into that anymore because I really spoke about that a lot. But again, in short, the idea is to incentivize higher quality coins, incentivize higher quality content. I think again, our goal is to create a product that can actually last. And for that to happen, you need to continue growing. Either you grow or you die. And the way to grow is to bring content creators from other areas of the Internet. You need to make it simple for them, you need to make it rewarding. They don't necessarily need to put in money. They don't need to worry about buying and selling. They don't need to worry about their reputation when they enter into this. We want to create a much better product and having these creator feet, creator revenue sharing is extremely key in that process. I think another aspect as well that is a bit more experimental, but we really wanted to bring it to market, is the notion of providing users with other kinds of assets and tokens to trade. So we partnered up with, I think 15, 20 partners. 10 of these partners have bridged their tokens from other blockchains to Solana for the very first time to create a liquidity pool and make their asset tradable on Solana. So we're talking about, I mean, we're talking about all these different kinds of projects. You're talking about Tron and Frax and Athena, the list goes on and on. But there's a list of great partners that we wanted to see. You know, are users interested in that? I mean, we spoke to a lot of users and we speak to them all the time. And I think there is that notion that people want to explore other things. But a lot of these users, again, this is not the stuff you see on CT every single day. Because everyone that's on CT, that's their life. They're spending 16 hours a day on CT, they're spending 16 hours a day in their little bubble. So many people use PumpFun and they don't know what CT is. They don't even have a centralized exchange account. They have no way of accessing these projects. So bringing that to them in a really accessible way. I think. I'm not necessarily going to say that it's going to be a massive game changer on day one, but it is an experiment and I'm, I'm, I'm pretty bullish on it. I think a lot of people are going to be interested in exploring these assets so, and, and actually diving into crypto beyond, you know, beyond just meme coins. So yeah, let's see, that's, that's kind of the, I guess the general focus of pumps.
- [57:37]
A
Now my understanding of pump swap is that it's correlated to Uniswap V2, the second version of Uniswap, which is just a fixed X times y equals k amm. I think it was Uniswap V3 that really brought the innovation of concentrated security. Excuse me, concentrated liquidity. But you guys are going with this more, more of a fixed curve model with no concentrated liquidity is talk about that choice because there's just like a, the further frontier of current AMM design. But you guys are starting at something more basic, something more foundational. Talk about the choice between the design of pump swap AMM and then where it can go from here.
- [58:18]
B
Yeah, I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix. Seems very clear that Uniswap V2 bonding curve is probably near optimal for these long tail assets like meme. Coins. I think again there's, there's probably ways to innovate on it. And I think when coins start being very successful, people start providing liquidity for them on concentrated liquidity AMMs people start exploring trading them on order book exchanges. I mean mainly off chain, but even on chain sometimes. So I think that is something to be explored in the future. But for now we've had all these meme coins launch very successfully using that, you know, that Uniswap V2 Radium V4 model. I don't think there's any reason to be too experimental there would rather experiment with some more of these kind of incentive alignment mechanisms.
- [59:12]
A
Okay, I do want to. You mentioned that you talked about it before and we have the creator revenue sharing, but I really want to trace over that conversation once more just because I think this is really. If meme coins have another chapter, a new chapter, I would hope that it would be centered around this mechanism and the optimistic side of what I think you and I both see out of this mechanism. What, what I see here is like this creator revenue sharing like simply put, it is allows the creator of a token to be incentivized with the volume of the token rather than by selling the token. And so previously with meme coins, the way that a creator of a coin would make money would be by selling the coin coin. And so that's, that is their incentive and that is fundamentally misaligned with every other buyer of that coin that comes down the line. And so just because the, the first, the first buyer, first holder of the coin has crazy incentive to sell. And what that ultimately can do, especially some, one of the most, one of the more nefarious side of creators is that they would, you know, rug. They would fsh. They would just dump on all of their holders and that would actually just kind of nuke the token. The token would more or less die from that moment on and the game was up. And then people would move on with creator revenue. The idea here, the idea that I see is that the creators of the tokens could in theory actually have zero percentage of the tokens. They could have no tokens, they'll likely have some, but they stood would still be incentivized to work on this project because they are paid by fees. They are paid by trading volume fees. And when you're incentivized to increase trading volume fees, you're a lot more aligned with the holders of your token and the actual number go up of your token. Because if number goes up, then you get you get more revenue, you get more, more volume. And so this, this has the opportunity to change meme coins from these like, inert financial assets to something with like a growth plan, like, so they could be an actual real business. And it could, it could just be like a single individual doing something, being some sort of creator on the Internet. And I think we all heard a big game out of the Creator economy in 2021, and it was very conceptual and I think it's still conceptual to this day. But I see this as like a mechanism that. Another tool in the tool belt that can help point towards that future. That's what I see out of this mechanism. I think we're yet to see any, any sort of thing like this really prove this mechanism out. But that's like my optimistic case. Would you agree with that? Optimistic case? And how would you change any of that?
- [61:41]
B
I completely agree. I don't think I could have phrased that any better, to be honest. Yeah, I think we're still in this experimental phase of seeing whether we can genuinely bring content creators or any kinds of creators to crypto and retain them and actually retain them in a way that is sustainable for not just, just them, but for the other side. You know, that the people, the holders, the, the traders, whatever you want to call them. So let's see. I think it's, it's very exciting.
- [62:10]
A
Okay, Ellen, I'm gonna read off a tweet from a Radium contributor who tweeted out about. I think this was basically because they are hearing, they heard the idea that Pump Fun is going to create their own AMM to pop out Radium and pop in their own vertical stack. So they tweeted out these two tweets back in February. While Pump's platform is impressive, whether this translates to significant network effects on a brand new untested AMM is yet to be seen. Raydium will continue enabling countless teams to build protocols that wouldn't otherwise be possible. I believe Pump Fund fully replacing Radium with their own AMM would represent a strategic miscalculation that underappreciates the crucial role Radium's AMM has played in the success of their liquidity bootstrapping functionality. Just general reaction to that statement from a Radium core contributor.
- [62:58]
B
Yeah, I mean, obviously I disagree with it again. I mean, if they want to, you know, they, they want to build their, their own, you know, launchpads or whatnot, we fully welcome it. We want to see people experiment with new kinds of models, new kinds of features at the end of the day. I think a big piece of this as well is, is, yeah, verticalization. But what is, you know, what does verticalization actually give you? It gives you the control to actually experiment in house. So you don't necessarily need to rely on a third party party. I wake up every day and I feel good because I do feel like the team, the team that we've built is one of the best teams in the space. We ship quickly, we iterate based on user feedback. I think there's many other teams in the space that don't take this nearly as serious and don't understand the user and they don't ship quickly and we don't want to be reliant on third parties. At the end of the day, you want to be able to deliver products without any excuses and Pump Swap is going to, you know, it gives us that privilege, but it also gives us responsibility. At the end of the day, if we fail in that endeavor, people are going to go elsewhere and it's going to be even more devastating. But I think we're willing to take that risk.
- [64:01]
A
Now Raydium has recently announced they are launching a token launch pad which will resemble some sort of a fork of Pumped Up Fund. I think they are calling it Launch Lab. Thoughts?
- [64:14]
B
Yeah, again, I mean, I'm going to say this a few times. I'm excited to see what they come up with. Yeah, let's see what happens. But, but we're not afraid of any competition.
- [64:22]
A
Is this the beginning of a feud between PumpFun and Raydium or are you guys going to be able to find a way to be ecosystem collaborators?
- [64:30]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think I don't see any feud. I just see businesses trying to deliver the best product to the end user. It's not just Raydium. I mean there's plenty of other platforms, copycats, whatever you want to call them, and many actually innovative kind of platforms in the Ethereum ecosystem and beyond that have taken some of pumpfund's ideas and iterated on at the end of the day, pump fun. You know, I think we came up with a really, really neat, a really neat mechanism to launch coins. But at the end of the day, a lot of, a lot of these ideas did stem from existing protocols, existing projects. So if we were going to see a new chapter, not just for Meme Coins, but I think Meme Coins as a whole and token generation on Chain is so rich, there's so many things that you can do with it. I think it is inevitable that there's going to be multiple different, different Niches that evolve from that and these niches are going to, to require their own mechanisms. I think that's inevitable. I think there's only so many things that you can do as a protocol, like, you know, like Pump Fun. You know, you want to be general purpose, but you want to address as many niches as possible. You can't address all niches. So I'm actually excited to see what people come up with and if any of them end up actually being very successful, you know, we, we would be interested in collaborating.
- [65:42]
A
Now there's a. I think, as you are well aware, crypto is inherently social through all parts of the stack. We are tribal. We all hang out on crypto Twitter, we all gossip, we all, we all create drama. Like basically anything that is crypto has some social element to it. And I think you even saw that with the live streaming feature in Pump Fun. Just social components work really well in crypto. Talk about that incoming part of the Pump Fund tech stack. How are you guys going to integrate like social elements in the future of Pumpkin Fun?
- [66:14]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think that's one thing that separated Pump Fun from the very beginning is make is really leaning into the social side of things. I think one design choice, if you want to talk about 4chan, one design choice that we took is, is actually making more social rather than the, you know, the accepted, I guess design at the time was really, you know, copying Dex Screener, for instance, and having this very financial view of the coins of the tokens that you were seeing, that list view. I don't think that's where, you know, projects should be trending. Projects should be creating. You know, the reason why social, you know, is, is so ubiquitous is because it actually brings in. It's, it's entertaining, it provides value. I think that's one thing that people are missing with meme coins. If you speak to many users again, maybe not the users that are on CT 16 hours a day, but the users that are on Pump Fund that don't have an exchange account. A lot of them are going to tell you they're not there because they're expecting to, you know, make a ton of money. They're there because it's like, hey, this seems pretty fun. I want to have a good laugh with my friends and trade on chain. It's really that simple. I mean, people don't believe me when I say that. They get offended when I say, but it's true. If you speak to them, that's what a lot of them end up saying. So actually Leaning into that even further, creating better experiences, more entertaining experiences. That's what's going to take to create. And that's why I call Pump Fund Crypto's biggest social network. That's why I think you can. You go from something that is a little rudimentary, a little simple, but you really lean into that and you turn it into this great thing and so many more avenues open up. So again, I think if you have, you know, if PumpFun continues growing and you have hundreds of thousands, millions of millions of people using it every single day, it is inevitable that these users are going to want to explore other things. Whether It's DeFi, Deepin, stablecoins, whatever that may be. It is inevitable. That is how we create the crypto natives of tomorrow. And that is why we continue leaning into the creator side of things so much and creating more social products. We recently introduced DMs and we'll continue iterating on that. We're usually a little tight lipped about the features that we're planning, but I think there's a lot to look forward to.
- [68:19]
A
I think there's something out there in the vertical of content, markets, news and tokens. And markets and tokens can kind of be the same thing. You see this a little bit with polymarket where there's news and then there's a market based off of that news and then. And with polymarket there's like a long tail of possible things, possible news events that there is a market associated with. I think there's a complex out there and I think Pump Fun is also pointing in this direction. But I don't think the final version of whatever this is has been totally unlocked. There's some com, there's some cloud of utility of value out there between news, events, markets, content and attention. And I think Pump Fun is like one of the closest things to that like center of what I, what I think is valuable. I'm kind of just pointing you in a direction, general direction of a conversation, but when you see the integration of like news, content, intention and markets, like, what do you see?
- [69:16]
B
Yeah, I love the fact that you brought up polymarket because I think polymarket is kind of a market for seeking truth. I think Pump Fund is more of a market to seek out attention. Like it's a really good measure of attention, right? Because if you, it's like the first time you actually have a metric, you can actually have metrics for how trending certain topics are. So for instance, if you have like a political event taking place, you can obviously look at the likelihood of it taking place or, you know, related events taking place in the future, but you can also look at the trading volume that the, you know, canonical coin behind that news event generated. You can look at the market cap that it reached. You look at its chart, and you can actually very accurately see how relevant that is. I think that's. That's a really interesting concept. I think, you know, if there's one thing that. That, you know, Pump Fun has been really interesting and is like, you know, people. Whenever the. Whenever there's these huge news events, you've got a lot of. A lot of people that try to, you know, to create coins based on the events that take place. It's kind of like the news unfolding in real time on chain. I think that that's just fascinating. I don't know exactly how that's going to evolve, but I think there's definitely something there. And people already, most news events, most forms of social media, they're not worth very much because there's only so much attention spread across humans and in the world. But those that end up succeeding, you can actually have quantifiable measures of how valuable they are to people. And I think that there's something there.
- [70:57]
A
Last few questions for you, Allan, before I let you go. What do you think is to one question twice. What do you want the future of meme coins to look like? What are you hopeful for that it looks like? And then what do you think it actually will be?
- [71:13]
B
That's a great question. I think my answer to. To these questions need to be. I'll be careful not to be too idealistic. Right. Because, you know, you want to. We want to. I think one thing we pride ourselves for is actually trying to be grounded in reality of what we're seeing and what is possible. What I want to see is I want the whole narrative to flip in terms of people thinking that these coins are. The activity of trading coins on chain is inherently valueless and nihilistic. I never bought into the idea of financial nihilism. I think that's a way for CT to rationalize what's been going on in the market. I think at the end of the day, people are trading these things, people are creating these because obviously there's financial value, but I think there's only financial value because there's value in other avenues, whether it's by entertainment, whether it's by trying to garner attention for your latest product. I wish to see a lot more of that. I definitely want to see fewer of These shitty events, these, that make people leave just better behavior. I think, you know, that that is definitely, you know, an area where Pump Fund needs to take a little bit more initiative, is setting that culture from the top down. I love the way that you put that. I think that's going to be very key and kind of regulating the, the, the content that takes place and the behavior and just resulting in a far more sustainable experience where people are happy to come back. You know, maybe they're not necessarily, maybe it's not necessarily the same experience, maybe it's not the same euphoria that we saw in November or January, but if you're able to create a product that people, that a significant number of people log onto every single day and are happy with, that is a win. And I think that is what we want to work on and achieve over the long run.
- [73:12]
A
Now there's going to be some listeners to this episode that I think are just, just forever inherently going to be resistant, antagonistic towards the idea of Meme Coins. And I think it's especially right now there, these, these individuals who believe this, that Meme coins are just inherently not capable of being like good. They, they also have kind of all the ammo on their side right now just because of the, the way that the market has panned out. One of some of the stats that Woo Blockchain just tweeted out. Since its inception on January 14, 2024, Pump Fund has launched over 8.7 million tokens, generating a cumulative revenue of $600 million. Currently only 4 of all the tokens launched by Pump Fund have managed to maintain a market cap of over a hundred million dollars. And so I think people are just looking at the $600 million of revenue that Pump Fund has made and then the total market cap of all Pump Fund tokens, which is somewhere between 4 and $500 million, maybe $600 million. And they're just seeing a discrepancy there. And I think that the belief that if you think that Meme coins are an inherently just like toxic product that can't create value and they are just a casino, I think anyone who believes this is, feels pretty validated, at least in this phase of the market. How would you, how do you respond to that or react to anyone who believes that just meme Coins are just not capable of actually rising above of some sort of just like short term casino game?
- [74:46]
B
Yeah, I mean, first of all, it's extremely easy to feel validated about that when the market, broadly speaking is down 50 plus percent. You know, Solana is down 50 plus percent. You Know, eth is down a lot. Bitcoin is down a ton from, from all time high. So again, all of these coins are all these asset, you know, meme coins, NFTs, DeFi, altcoins, whatever, they're all risk assets. If everything plunges then. And similarly meme coins are going to plunge as well. It's funny that no one was talking about this when the. I think there was. The cumulative market cap of pump fund coins in November was something like 8 billion. Right. It wasn't even close to what it is. You know, obviously the discrepancy is massive because again these are, they are massively risky. No one is claiming that they aren't, but I think it's very easy to say, to say that right now. I also think that what some people are missing is that, you know, the user experience is actually quite sticky within, within the current user base. So if you are a crypto user today, you are as likely to use to trade meme coins on Solana or on pumpfund than you were in January. The only difference between January and March is that there are fewer crypto users, but the same crypto users, they're doing the same things they were doing a few months ago. I don't think that's going to change. I think yeah, again a lot of people like to point towards NFTs and how they died out. Ultimately I do think that was one natural evolution of meme coins. I think again meme coins will have to evolve to remain relevant and we want to be a part of that. But ultimately the market is going to speak for itself. It's either going to be pumped or it's not. But meme coins are going to survive in some shape or form and that is because they do provide some sort of value to the end user and time will tell to what extent that is going to be true. But even if you look at NFTs for instance, sure they're so far are down from what they were last cycle but a lot of these NFT collections are still incredibly valuable. Like still hundreds of millions in market cap billions. Like it's still extremely valuable. So the notion that, okay, I mean they're, they're up a ton because there's a massive speculative bubble now, they're worthless. It's not necessarily true. I mean you look at, you know, pudgy penguins for instance, like is that not valuable? I mean that's, that would be insane. And again, yeah, it might not be at its all time high, but it still provides a lot of value. So let's see how things play out. I think at the end of the day, meme coins are here to say they've existed for 10 years. I challenge listeners to argue why all of a sudden things are going to change after so many years of the same kinds of user behaviors taking place. But one thing that I'd like to say as well is I'd like to extend an olive branch to anyone that hasn't used the pump fun. Anyone in the Ethereum community that wants to it out. I promise you, set aside an hour and try it out. I think a lot of you are going to change your minds about what kinds of value it brings to the table. It's really not as simple as what CT likes to say because CT is always wrong.
- [77:46]
A
What would you say is the mission of Pump Fund? Is it more tokens? Is it more trading volume? Is it making your users more wealthy? What would you say is the mission? What's your North Star Star?
- [77:59]
B
I think all of them are actually very much interconnected. I think obviously trading volume is a very major component of that. I think that is a good North Star to have because it reflects the amount of activity that's going on similarly to how any layer 1 blockchain will look at the. I mean, it's difficult. There's actually a lot of debate going on about what metrics to look at, but people like looking at rev recently because that's actual economic value that's being generated. I think similarly we want to look at the economic value that's kind of, you know, keeping people on over the long run. That's probably the best metric to look at. But besides that, I think all of these different aspects are extremely relevant. So a lot of people think that more coins is a bad thing. I've always said that more coins inherently is a good thing. Obviously you want to incentivize good behavior, quality content. I think that was a missing piece that is going to be rectified with some of the features that are coming up. But, but if you have a low barrier to entry, if you allow anybody to take to, to, to, to participate in the market, especially those that aren't, you know, aren't part of the ecosystem, you are going to massively increase the chance of good things just taking place. Like what, what, what Griffin would all these, some of these projects have launched and gotten the users that they would have. If coin creation was 10 Solana would have costed 20 Solana. I highly doubt, doubt it. I very much. I doubt it. I really do. So I think coin creation is very important. I think, you know, user wealth is extremely important. Again, just look at the data. You know, when the market was at its hottest, there's the most amount of trading volume, there's the most amount of excitement. People were super positive about Meme coins. Again, at the end of the day, this is a market based system. So whenever risk assets fall, there's not that much you can do about it. But what you can do is build a product that, that remains stable and grows in a sustainable manner over the long run over the next 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years. And that's why it's really important not to get bogged down in the details of what's going on in the day to day and really zoom out, look at the user behaviors, look at how they're changing or remaining the same on a fundamental level and continue iterating.
- [80:18]
A
Alan I think some listeners, maybe most listeners will think will see the title of this episode when they, when they clicked on it and they'll say like, oh wow, Pump Fun on Bankless. That is a weird combo. Maybe share a little bit of your why Bankless? Of all the podcasts that are out there, there are more like Solana interested podcasts. There's, you know, there's plenty of options. Why Bankless?
- [80:43]
B
First of all, I haven't done, I personally haven't done a spaces in I think four to six months. Haven't done a, a podcast since the one that I did with Thread Guy last summer. I wanted to come up with a bang and I obviously, I know that this is going to generate a lot of people are going to be angry about this. So naturally I think this is a win because I want people to hear myself out as an advocate for these social experiences on chain, meme coins and all that stuff. I also think some of our biggest critics are in the Ethereum ecosystem. I want them to understand that there's so much common ground that we have and I think we really get bogged down over really stupid details. I think Twitter is just not a great platform because it incentivizes really strongly incentivizes people to get angry at each other. And I think there's no surprise that there's this huge gap between what people see in other ecosystems to Solana or Pump Fund. I think those are the two main reasons. I'm very happy about how this conversation went. I know a lot of people are going to, there's going to be a lot of criticism, but I think that's going to be healthy, and I think that's going to be good. And again, thank you for having me on, David.
- [81:58]
A
Yeah, thank you, Alan. One last question for you before you go. Win Pump Token.
- [82:03]
B
There's no plan for a token at the moment.
- [82:06]
A
Okay, so it sounds like you. You plead the fifth. Alan, thank you for, for joining me on Vanquist today.
- [82:12]
B
Yeah, I really appreciate it. David, Once again and to all listeners, again I extend an olive branch. Please come and try out Pump Fun. I promise it's not going to be a waste of your time. You're at least going to learn a little bit more about what crypto users are doing today. And, you know, if things go well, you know, maybe we will. We'll have a chat one day.
- [82:29]
A
Alan, thanks a lot. Bankless Nation. You guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in. But nonetheless, we are headed west. This is frontier. It's not for everyone. But we are glad you are with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot,
- [82:53]
B
Sam.