Score: the most successful casino ever built on a blockchain — honest about the game, brutal about the odds. The platform always gets paid. Almost nobody else does.
Pump.fun lets anyone launch a tradable token on Solana in about a minute, for free, with no code and no presale. Since January 2024 it has hosted somewhere between 12 and 24 million token launches (trackers disagree — both figures are in the sources below), collected $2.37 billion in user-paid fees, and kept about $1.39 billion of it as revenue. It has also been banned from its own home country, sued under the RICO statute, and watched roughly 98.6% of its tokens show pump-and-dump traits. This post covers what it is, who's behind it, whether it's regulator-friendly (short answer: no), how launching a token actually works, the handful of tokens that made it, and the competitors trying to eat it.
One clarification up front, because we make it in every review: everything on Pump.fun is a token — issued on Solana's blockchain. SOL is the coin. Pump.fun tokens have no chain, no miners, and no yield. Their price is pure supply and demand against the next buyer.
What Pump.fun actually is
Launch a token and it starts life on a bonding curve — a built-in pricing formula instead of an order book. Every token has a fixed supply of 1 billion. About 800 million sit on the curve; the rest is reserved for liquidity if the token graduates. Early buyers get in at an implied market cap of a few thousand dollars. Every buy pushes the price up the curve; every sell pushes it back down. There is no presale, no team allocation, and no way to mint more — that's the "fair launch" design, and it genuinely does kill the classic insider-dump setup.
How the curve works, illustrated (not a specific token). When net buying reaches about 85 SOL, the token "graduates" off the curve. Chart: BogusAPY.
When roughly 85 SOL of net buying has come in — a market cap around $69,000, though the dollar figure floats with SOL's price — the token graduates: it leaves the curve, liquidity is created on an exchange, and the curve liquidity is burned so nobody can pull it. Until March 2025 graduates went to Raydium; since then they've gone to PumpSwap, Pump.fun's own exchange, which also killed the old 6 SOL migration fee (it's now 0.015 SOL). Creating a token has been free since August 2024 — you pay network gas, and whatever you choose to buy of your own token. Trading on the curve costs 1.25% per trade: 0.95% to the platform, 0.30% to the token's creator (fees per Pump.fun's official fee page, updated October 17, 2026).
Who's behind it
Pump.fun is run by Baton Corporation Ltd, registered in England in March 2023. The founders are Noah Tweedale (CEO), Alon Cohen, and Dylan Kerler, each holding 25–50% of the company. They are public figures now — Cohen in particular posts and gives interviews constantly — which already puts them ahead of most of this industry.
The skeletons, because we always check. In May 2024, a former developer, Jarett Dunn, used his privileged access to drain about $1.9 million from the platform. He was arrested in London and in December 2025 got six years in a UK prison. In November 2024 the site's livestream feature — launched to help creators promote tokens — produced a run of extreme stunts, including a creator threatening a dog on camera and a 13-year-old who launched a token, hyped it live, and dumped roughly $50,000 worth on his own viewers. Pump.fun shut livestreams down on November 25, 2024 and relaunched them in April 2025 with moderation and restrictions. Separately, WIRED and CertiK have reported that an individual with the same name as one founder was behind 2017 micro-cap tokens (eBitcoinCash/EthereumCash) that took in roughly $75,000 — that identification is reported, not confirmed, the founder hasn't commented, and we're printing it at exactly that weight.
And the biggest number attached to the team: the $PUMP token sale. On July 12, 2025, Pump.fun sold PUMP in an ICO that raised $600 million from the public in 12 minutes at a $4 billion valuation (plus roughly $720 million in private sales; US and UK buyers were excluded). Fifteen months later, PUMP trades around $0.0042 — meaning ICO buyers are up about 5% total, after a ride that included an all-time high of $0.00882 in September 2025, an all-time low of $0.00115 in June 2026, a ~$465 million USDC cash-out by the project in November 2025, and a burn of 127 billion tokens in April 2026.
Is it regulator-friendly? No — and it's not close
Let's run the actual record instead of the vibes.
Its home country banned it. On December 3, 2024, the UK's Financial Conduct Authority put Pump.fun on its Warning List. Three days later Pump.fun permanently geoblocked the United Kingdom — the country where Baton Corporation is registered. It holds no licenses anywhere. US and UK persons were also excluded from the PUMP sale, which tells you what the company's own lawyers think of its regulatory position in those markets.
The US token law genuinely improved. On February 27, 2025, SEC staff issued a statement that memecoins generally are not securities — while warning in the same breath that buyers get no federal securities-law protections and fraud is still fraud. In March 2026 the SEC and CFTC's joint taxonomy formally classified memecoins as "digital collectibles." So the tokens themselves sit in a friendlier spot than they did in 2024.
The platform is still in court — under RICO. The big US class action (Southern District of New York) got a split ruling on August 31, 2026: Judge McMahon dismissed the claims against the Solana defendants, dismissed the securities claims (the named tokens failed the Howey test's common-enterprise prong — a narrow, token-specific ruling), and dismissed the gambling theory. But the RICO claims survived against Baton and all three founders personally, built on wire-fraud and unlicensed-money-transmission predicates. Baton answered the complaint in October 2026. There is no trial date and nobody has been found liable for anything — surviving a motion to dismiss is not a conviction. It is also not "regulator-friendly." Add that the CLARITY Act, the bill that might have settled the legal status of platforms like this, failed a Senate cloture vote on September 15, 2026 — and the honest score is: Pump.fun operates in a gray zone, unlicensed, geoblocking its home country, defending a federal racketeering suit. The tokens got clearer. The platform didn't.
How to make a token on Pump.fun
The mechanics, because they're simple — and because understanding them is understanding the whole game:
- Get a Solana wallet. Phantom is the standard. Fund it with some SOL for gas and any buying you plan to do.
- Go to pump.fun and connect the wallet.
- Click "start a new coin." Enter a name, a ticker, a description, and an image. Optional: links to X, Telegram, a website.
- Optionally, buy your own token first — the "dev buy." This is the moment that decides whether anyone trusts your launch: a creator who buys a modest amount and holds is making a different statement than one who loads up cheap and dumps on the first green candle, and every wallet-watcher on the site can see which you did, forever, on-chain.
- Pay the network fee and launch. Creation itself is free. Your token is now live on the bonding curve, tradable by anyone on Earth within seconds.
- Trade on the curve. Every buy and sell pays the 1.25% fee — 0.30% of it to you as creator, on every trade, for as long as the token trades. Since January 2026 creator fees can be split across up to 10 wallets. Cohen said in October 2026 that creators collectively are being paid "well over $20 million a week" — a big number that averages out to almost nothing across millions of launches.
- Graduate, or don't. Reach ~85 SOL of net buying (~$69K market cap) and the token moves to PumpSwap with burned liquidity. Fail to, and it stays on the curve until attention dies — which brings us to the odds.
The honest odds, sourced. About 1.4% of tokens ever graduate. Of roughly 11.9 million launches tracked by Dune, only 96 tokens ever passed a $1 million market cap. Bitquery's data says 79% of tokens trade only on their first day. Solidus Labs found 98.6% of Pump.fun tokens showed scam or pump-and-dump traits. Between 30,000 and 42,000 new tokens launch every day. Launching is free; being one of the 96 is the hard part, and the difference is almost never the token — it's whether a crowd shows up and stays.
The ones that made it: Pump.fun's biggest tokens
Peak market cap vs. today (CoinGecko, checked October 31, 2026). Read both columns — the second one is the lesson.
| Token | Peak market cap | Now | From peak |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fartcoin | ~$2.48B | ~$119.9M | −95.2% |
| PNUT (Peanut the Squirrel) | ~$2.44B | ~$39.9M | −98.4% |
| GOAT (Goatseus Maximus) | ~$1.35B | ~$13.8M | −99.0% |
| PIPPIN | ~$880M (Feb 2026) | ~$13.9M | −98.4% |
| MOODENG | ~$680M | ~$35M | −94.8% |
| CHILLGUY | ~$660M | ~$4M | −99.4% |
| TROLL | ~$260M | ~$27M | −89.6% |
The stories in one line each: PNUT rode a viral news event (a pet squirrel seized by New York authorities days before the 2024 election). GOAT was shilled into existence by an AI chatbot, Truth Terminal. Fartcoin — the biggest survivor of the lot — is, and we cannot improve on this summary, a fart joke with a loyal community. MOODENG was a baby hippo in a Thai zoo. CHILLGUY was a copyrighted cartoon character whose creator objected publicly, which only made it trade harder. TROLL, the "best" performer on the list at only −89.6%, has an actual licensing deal for the Trollface IP. Notice the pattern: not one of them has a product, revenue, or yield. The asset is the meme's staying power, and staying power has a half-life.
The competitors
LetsBONK (Bonk.fun) is the one that actually beat it. In July 2025 the BONK-community launchpad took the crown — 58.5% of launches on July 6, roughly 78% of launchpad revenue by late July. Then it collapsed almost as fast: by August 2026 its own dashboard showed roughly $2,740 a day in revenue, and it suffered a hack in March 2026. Its flagship token, USELESS (~$127M market cap today), is worth more than the platform's recent business. Moonshot (from DEX Screener) holds the mainstream, app-store-friendly niche. SunPump is the same model on Tron; Four.Meme runs it on BNB Chain. Believe tried launching tokens from X posts; Jupiter Studio is Jupiter's in-house entry; Bags competes on creator fee-sharing. Raydium, which lost the graduation business when PumpSwap launched, answered with its own LaunchLab. And 2026's surprise: StonkFun, launched in late July 2026, did $1.51 million of revenue in a single day in September and is the current #2. As of late October 2026, though, the throne is Pump.fun's again — $12.85 million of revenue in the last 7 days (DefiLlama).
Where the money comes from
This is the part BogusAPY exists for. Pump.fun tokens pay no yield and generate no revenue. Every dollar a trader wins comes from a trader who bought later and sold lower — minus the toll. The toll is not small: $2.37 billion in fees, of which the platform keeps roughly 59 cents of every fee dollar. Dune's wallet math (Adam Tehc, January 2025): of 13.55 million wallets, 0.41% had made $10,000 or more; about 293 wallets had made $1 million. CoinGecko Research found most monthly wallets were in the red from April 2024 through late 2025 (profitable wallets bottomed at 30.1% in June 2025); even after flipping positive in early 2026, 65% of "winners" had made between $1 and $500. The casino comparison gets used a lot with Pump.fun. It's not fair to casinos — a casino can't also sell you the chips, the table, and a token called PUMP.
The bottom line. Pump.fun is a genuinely impressive piece of engineering wrapped around the oldest game in markets: a crowd bidding on nothing but the crowd. It's transparent — every wallet, fee, and dump is on-chain — and the platform's take is real revenue in a way most of crypto's never was. But regulator-friendly it is not, the average token is dead within a day, and the average wallet loses. If you launch, launch like it's entertainment with a receipt. If you trade, know whose exit liquidity you are.
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Check it yourself: links and sources
Official: pump.fun and its fees page (updated October 17, 2026) for creation cost, the 1.25% curve fee split, and the PumpSwap fee schedule; UK Companies House filing for Baton Corporation Ltd (registered March 2023).
Regulation and court record: FCA Warning List entry for Pump.fun (December 3, 2024); SEC Division of Corporation Finance staff statement on meme coins (February 27, 2025); SEC/CFTC joint interpretive release on digital-asset taxonomy (March 17, 2026); SDNY class-action ruling of August 31, 2026 (securities and gambling claims dismissed; RICO claims survive) as reported by CoinDesk and DL News, October 2026.
Data: DefiLlama (protocol fees $2.37B all-time, revenue $1.39B, 7-day revenue $12.85M, checked October 31, 2026); Dune dashboards (launch counts — trackers range from ~11.9M to ~23.9M total launches; 96 tokens over $1M market cap; wallet-profitability analysis by Adam Tehc, January 2025); Bitquery (79% of tokens trade only on day one); Solidus Labs (98.6% of tokens with scam/pump-and-dump traits); CoinGecko (peak and current market caps for every token in the winners table, and PUMP price history, checked October 31, 2026); WIRED and CertiK reporting on the 2017 tokens (identification unconfirmed); Reuters and CoinDesk (Dunn sentencing, December 2025; livestream shutdown, November 2024). Full research dossier with per-fact sourcing kept on file at BogusAPY.
Not financial advice.
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