Once the most profitable application, has it now completely given up?

Original source: Cookie

Original Title: The Most Profitable Application in the Crypto World Begins to Go Downhill

From taking on bonk.fun to conducting and completing one of the largest ICOs in cryptocurrency history, this year's pump.fun may not be as glorious in terms of profitability as last year, but it is still quite successful. As of today, pump.fun has spent nearly 1 million SOL (approximately $188 million) in fee income to repurchase 12.227% of the total supply of $PUMP.

However, the continuous and large-scale buybacks have not improved the price of pump.fun’s tokens, and it continues to decline. The actions of pump.fun and its co-founder alon have increasingly dissatisfied the market. The day before yesterday, Mario Nawfal, a major influencer with over 2.6 million followers on X, publicly criticized pump.fun on his secondary account:

“Even though pump.fun is a for-profit company, their actions are truly perplexing. Solana has been struggling, yet they sold SOL in the order of billions of dollars. They completed the ICO of $PUMP months ago and promised an airdrop, but have yet to deliver on that, nor have they reinvested in the entire ecosystem. Setting aside the moral aspect of what this company should be doing, from a business perspective, how can we expect to see sustained growth when they so blatantly disregard the achievements of their ecosystem?”

This may be the largest public criticism of pump.fun by a KOL that we have seen so far. Just a few hours after this tweet, pump.fun announced a community grant of $10,000 each to 6 meme coins within its ecosystem, which was nothing short of adding fuel to the fire and was mercilessly mocked by the “trench”.

There are many tweets like this in the comments section below this tweet:

I c you.

“That's really funny.”

“You earn so much money every day, and then you only give these meme coins that are struggling to build in your ecosystem 10,000 dollars? What can 10,000 dollars do?”

In August this year, when pump.fun faced a fierce challenge from bonk.fun, they launched the Glass Full Foundation, spending about $1.7 million to purchase some meme coins that performed well in their ecosystem. However, since then, pump.fun has not supported any of the meme coins in their ecosystem with real money. About two weeks ago, the “last survivor” $neet in the Glass Full Foundation also fell below the price at which pump.fun made its purchase, and the holdings of the Glass Full Foundation are now all at a loss, with total losses amounting to approximately $1.37 million.

Players who firmly stand by pump.fun in the battle against bonk.fun, as well as those who hope that pump.fun can take on the heavy responsibility of revitalizing the meme market, can be said to be as disappointed as they can be. They hope that pump.fun can properly support its own ecosystem, rather than suddenly jumping to engage in CCM (live streaming tokens), then suddenly getting involved in ICM, and in the end, making a mess of everything.

The large buybacks but sluggish price of $PUMP is gradually being questioned under the increasingly despondent player sentiment and disappointment.

“How do you explain that $PUMP repurchased over 10% yet still broke the issue price?”

In this situation, the official Twitter account of pump.fun, as well as the official Twitter account of pump.fun co-founder Alon, inexplicably fell into a silence lasting about 10 days, without a single tweet. They didn't even mention the important update “Mayhem Mode” from the previous pump.fun.

By the way, the “Mayhem Mode” is also heavily criticized by players. Due to the sluggish state of the Solana meme market, the lowered token graduation threshold and the mechanism of randomly purchasing the tokens through the transaction fees when activating this mode are seen as pump.fun draining the resources.

The unreasonable silence made aixbt, this AI, jump out and fire at pump.fun:

“pump.fun charged a fee of $300 million, but the token graduation rate is now only 0.7%. There are 12,610 launches per day, of which 98 are successful. The platform profits from 99.3% of failed token launches. The team suddenly disappeared 13 days ago, during the highest trading volume week ever. It is claimed that their buyback is just a transfer from one hand to the other; this product itself is a value juicer.”

Then, a tweet from Lookonchain sparked rumors in the market that “pump.fun had run away”:

“It seems that pump.fun has cashed out at least $436.5 million since October 15.”

This tweet finally brought pump.fun “back from the dead.” The co-founder of pump.fun, Sapijiju, tweeted claiming that Lookonchain's tweet is completely untrue, stating that pump.fun has not cashed out any funds, but has only transferred the funds raised from the ICO to different wallets so that the company can use these funds for investment in business development.

This explanation is clearly inadequate. The acquisitions that pump.fun has disclosed so far are only Kolscan and Padre. The former is a tool for tracking KOL trading profits and losses, while the latter is a trading terminal. When the news of the acquisition of Padre was announced, pump.fun also announced that the Padre token would no longer be used on the platform and that there were no further future plans.

Imagine a company in Web2 being acquired, and just as the shareholders are happy for a couple of minutes, they are told that all their stocks are worthless. This is the cold and ruthless tragedy that happened that night, where those who didn't carefully follow the tweet thread were left hanging at the mountain top, and the original holders of $PADRE had nowhere to seek help.

Finally saw it was acquired by a big company in the industry

In the end, although the rumors about pump.fun running away are currently unfounded panic, and pump.fun has responded, this reflects the concentrated expression of market dissatisfaction. If pump.fun is just a business that is good at calculations, but does not take people's feelings into consideration when making those calculations, it cannot be called a shrewd calculator.

Of course, it is also possible that they have made enough money and do not care about anything anymore. After all, the airdrop has not shown any signs of “coming soon” since the tweet on July 9. Alon said that the fourth quarter would be a glorious quarter, but the result is a desolate scene. The lack of transparent communication and the joke-like community incentives that disrespect the community have only increased players' dissatisfaction.

How does “trench” say I love you, pump.fun?