“Which other cryptocurrency native applications can make money?”

When it comes to this question, you may instinctively react—stablecoins, CEX, Perp DEX, on-chain Pokémon cards...

However, pump.fun, which once shone brightly during the meme craze and set one of the largest IPO amounts in cryptocurrency history, is starting to be easily forgotten. In some conversations, I even heard questions like:

“Is pump.fun still alive? Can they still make money?”

pump.fun not only can still make money but remains a top-tier “money printer” in the world of crypto-native applications. According to DefiLlama statistics, whether in any time range of 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, or 1 year, pump.fun's revenue ranks only below Tether, Circle, and Hyperliquid, consistently holding the 4th position.

Despite various “shill” community groups being eerily quiet, with many not having a single person speak for days, pump.fun's average daily revenue in the past 7 or 30 days still exceeds one million US dollars.

Is this revenue real, or is pump.fun faking it?

Is pump.fun's revenue real?

Firstly, according to pump.fun’s official revenue dashboard, pump.fun's current revenue consists of three parts:

- Bonding Curve Revenue: Transaction fee revenue before a new coin graduates, where pump.fun charges a 0.95% protocol fee on transactions in this part

- Pumpswap Revenue: For coins that have successfully graduated (moved to Pumpswap AMM for trading), a 0.93% protocol fee is charged on transactions for tokens with a market cap of 0-420 SOL

- Terminal (Padre) Revenue: pump.fun acquired the Padre trading terminal in October last year and rebranded it as the multi-chain trading platform Terminal. Subsequently, the revenue from this trading platform is also included in pump.fun's revenue

- Revenue deducted referral commissions and trade cashback

For the protocol revenue from the bonding curve phase, the Solana address officially used by pump.fun to receive this part of the revenue is CebN5WGQ4jvEPvsVU4EoHEpgzq1VV7AbicfhtW4xC9iM. The bonding curve revenue collected to this address is hard-coded into the contract, and if falsifying revenue by external fund transfers to this address were to occur, there would be external addresses directly calling the System Program's Transfer instruction. After analyzing transactions to this address, we did not find any behavior of forging income through simple external SOL transfers.

In other words, the bonding curve revenue does indeed come entirely from protocol fee extraction from real contract calls.

The revenue data of DefiLlama's pump.fun bonding curve is directly from calling the pump.fun official API, which is why we initially conducted on-chain analysis of pump.fun's official bonding curve revenue address. However, DefiLlama's revenue data for Pumpswap and Terminal (Padre) is calculated through Dune SQL queries on Solana's on-chain data, completely independent of pump.fun's official API, ensuring high on-chain objectivity and tamper resistance.

Thus far, we have ruled out the suspicion of pump.fun falsifying revenue through "external transfers" or "false reporting of data" in a crude manner. However, there is still the possibility that they may generate false revenue through "wash trading" via bots or internal wallets. Therefore, we need to inquire further — in the current sluggish cryptocurrency market overall and notably waning meme coin hype, is pump.fun's revenue genuine and organic?

Viability of pump.fun Revenue in the Current Market Environment

According to data from Token Terminal, in the first quarter of this year, Solana's daily active address count remained between 1.2 million and 2.2 million, while on pump.fun, it was approximately 150,000.

Simultaneously, based on statistics from Dune's pump.fun-related dashboard, the approximately 150,000 addresses corresponded to a daily average of about 30,000 new token deployments.

This implies that if every day 30,000 new tokens are independently deployed by different real users, around 20% of active users on pump.fun are deploying new coins every day. However, according to a paper published by Giulio Marino et al. last month titled "Predicting the success of new crypto-tokens: the Pump.fun case," between September 1, 2025, and October 1, 2025, a total of 655,770 new tokens were deployed on pump.fun, yet the number of addresses deploying tokens was only 243,123.

And the current token's daily deployment count is even higher than last September:

Considering the current market environment, this data seems somewhat counterintuitive—while it feels like cryptocurrency is dying on social media, there are still so many new tokens being deployed on pump.fun every day. Additionally, the number of active addresses in the past month is about 10% higher than last September.

Out of the daily million-dollar revenue on pump.fun, Pumpswap and Terminal (Padre) still hold a relatively small share. For example, based on the data from March 18th, on that day, the revenues of Pumpswap and Terminal (Padre) were approximately $284,000 and $58,000, respectively, while the revenue from the bonding curve was around $795,000, about 2.3 times the sum of the former two.

The graduation rate of new tokens has recently even exceeded two times that of last September:

Meanwhile, around 26,000 new tokens were deployed on pump.fun on that day. To achieve the $795,000 bonding curve revenue, a bonding curve volume of around $79,500,000 needs to be achieved, averaging about $8,368.42 million in bonding curve volume after deducting the 0.95% protocol fee collected by the bonding curve. On average, each new deployed token needs to contribute approximately $3,218 in volume before successfully graduating.

Considering the above data, it doesn't sound so difficult for each new token to contribute just over $3,000 in volume on average; instead, it seems quite normal because even in the data-obscured environment of last September, pump.fun was still able to achieve this goal. When calculated in terms of SOL, the SOL earned now is even more than last September, but the income in terms of USD has decreased.

However, at this point, we still have a question: Since last August, pump.fun has almost entirely used its daily revenue to buy back $PUMP, repurchasing over 10% of the total supply and over 30% of the current circulating supply of $PUMP so far. Why then does the price of $PUMP keep dropping? Although through on-chain data, we can see that the over $300 million worth of $PUMP repurchased by pump.fun remains untouched in the wallet, is it possible that they are artificially inflating revenue through wash trading, pretending to "buy back" while secretly unloading through dispersed addresses?

Where Did $PUMP Go?

Let's take a look at the token release plan for $PUMP:

So far, the circulating supply of $PUMP is as follows:

- ICO: 33%, fully unlocked at TGE

- Team: 20%, still locked

- Investors: 13%, still locked

- LP and Exchange: 2.6%, fully unlocked at TGE

- Ecosystem Fund: 2.4%, fully unlocked at TGE

- Live Support: 3%, fully unlocked at TGE

- Foundation: 2%, fully unlocked at TGE

- Community and Ecosystem Incentives: 24%, approximately 50% unlocked at TGE, the remaining portion unlocks linearly over 1 year, currently 65.27% of this portion is unlocked

In the $PUMP multisig custodial wallet address Cfq1ts1iFr1eUWWBm8eFxUzm5R3YA3UvMZznwiShbgZt, there are still roughly around 36.5% of $PUMP from the total supply.

This does not align with the $PUMP token release plan. What we can be certain of is that post-TGE, all $PUMP was transferred to a multisig custodial wallet for distribution. Theoretically, the maximum transferable amount should only be around 58.67% of the total supply (ICO 33% + LP and Exchange 2.6% + Ecosystem Fund 2.4% + Live Support 3% + Foundation 2% + 15.67% of Community and Ecosystem Incentives already unlocked), and the $PUMP balance in the multisig custodial wallet should not be less than around 41.33%, with a difference of about 4.83%.

Where did this 4.83% go? We don't know. We don't even know where the portion of $PUMP, apart from the ICO sale distribution, which had clear intended purposes in its description, is located. Although based on on-chain data comparison, we did discover that approximately 24% of $PUMP from the total supply has been dormant in various addresses after large transfers, which roughly corresponds to the portion outside of the ICO sale distribution. However, the official pump.fun team has never disclosed the deposit addresses corresponding to the funds in each part of the wallets.

Especially concerning the Community and Ecosystem Incentives part, currently, the only community and ecosystem incentive activities we are openly aware of are the Glass Full Foundation (purchased a total of about $1.7 million of pump.fun ecosystem meme coins), giving $10,000 to each of 6 meme coin communities, a total of $60,000 in grants, funding 12 projects with $250,000, tallying up to $3 million given out but currently only announcing the winners of 6 hackathons.

However, this part is already considered the clearest...

Yet, even with this transparency issue, even though 4.83% has been stealthily shipped out, the official pump.fun buyback, which holds over 10% of the total supply and over 30% of the current circulation, can offset this sell pressure. Why is the price of $PUMP still struggling?

A possible reason is that $PUMP indeed does not have enough buying pressure. In the absence of market recognition, large buybacks also disappear without a trace.

An Unrecognized "Casino"

When it comes to Hyperliquid, we will certainly acknowledge its Perp DEX's leading position and narrative potential. However, in the meme coin arena of pump.fun, even retail investors mostly consider it a scam and unsustainable.

Earlier in the article, we acknowledged the legitimacy of pump.fun's revenue. Now we need to look at some other data. This data can explain that the negative view of meme coins is not only a retail investor's emotional aversion to the intense volatility of meme coins but also creates rational resistance for institutional investors.

As early as April last year, a study by Medallion Analytics showed that during a 180-day statistical period, about 178,000 deployers who launched multiple tokens, 85.3% of them were profitable. In 180 days, these deployers collectively issued about 3.59 million tokens, of which approximately 3.07 million were issued by profitable deployers, accounting for about 85.5%.

During the statistical period, the top 10 profitable deployers earned about 365,000 SOL, while the 10 deployers with moderate profit only earned 47.3 SOL, a difference of about 7720 times. For the top deployers, the average interval for issuing new tokens is only 0.11 hours, while the moderate deployers last as long as 10.96 hours.

Solidus Labs studied the performance of newly deployed tokens on pump.fun between January 2024 and March 2025. The research analysis pointed out that as much as 98.6% of the tokens were schemes to pump and dump.

The issuance of meme coins has long ceased to be a competition of creativity but a profit-seeking production line. After a short period of rapid profit-making for top deployers, they can reinvest funds in facilities related to automatic token issuance to speed up their harvesting rate.

pump.fun has driven the cost of launching a new meme coin on Solana down to $2 or even less, which is indeed a technological advancement. However, they did not steer the meme coin race in a positive direction, leading retail and institutional investors to believe that meme coins are truly a cultural or even ideological asset. They tried to expand the race to include live coins, ICM coins, and most recently AI Agent coins, but none of these attempts have been successful.

The data is there: they still made the most money by providing a "low-cost harvesting tool," much like a casino rake.

For pump.fun, every new coin deployment and every fake volume pumped before the token's graduation allows them to earn a steady 0.95% risk-free return. If you want to give the token more exposure, you need to pump more volume, providing more income to pump.fun. The funds in this ecosystem are real, the income is real, but the ecosystem itself is not organic, and retail investors are hurt. For institutional investors, such an ecosystem lacks a healthy, sustainable long-term foundation, which may be the root cause of pump.fun's coin price slump.

In the end, we have one more question:

Since pump.fun's buyback does not boost the coin price, would using the daily income for staking rewards be better than the current buyback?

Perhaps, or perhaps they no longer care.