Pump and circumstance

In late 2024 a child launched a meme coin, sold their entire holding at once and made a five-figure profit.^{5The BlockKid launches memecoin via Pump.fun and sells early, missing out on theoretical millions20 Nov 2024} Others then bought the abandoned coin and took over its running, and the remainder of the creator’s stake would later have been worth over $2.5m.^{5The BlockKid launches memecoin via Pump.fun and sells early, missing out on theoretical millions20 Nov 2024} It is a good story, and its moral is the opposite of the one it seems to tell.

Pump.fun, a Solana-based launch site, lets anyone create a token in minutes with no code and little money. Solidus Labs, a blockchain-surveillance firm, counted more than 7m tokens launched there, of which only about 97,000 kept at least $1,000 of liquidity.^{1Forklog (citing Solidus Labs)Report: 98% of Pump.fun's memecoins deemed scams8 May 2025} That is roughly 1.4%. Meme coins are a young person’s game in the sense that they are cheap, social and played from a phone; no survey that we found reports the age of those who launch them, and we will not pretend otherwise. What the data show is who gets paid.

Few survivors. Pump.fun tokens, thousands

	Tokens
Launched	7000
Kept $1,000 of liquidity	97

Source: Solidus Labs, 2025 Rug Pull Report, as reported by Forklog¹

We think the answer is the platform, and that the young are being sold a lottery with the odds printed on the back. By August 2024 Pump.fun had collected almost $94.5m in fees since launch.^{3UnchainedMost users keep losing money on Pump.fun despite the protocol's record profits20 Aug 2024} In July 2025 it sold its own PUMP token to the public, raising $600m, according to co-founder Alon Cohen, in 12 minutes at a $4bn valuation.^{4The BlockPump.fun raises $600 million in 12 minutes as PUMP tokens fully sell out12 Jul 2025} A casino can be fair and profitable. This one is merely profitable.

Consider the odds for everybody else. In August 2024 only 32 of more than a million tokens launched on the site had a fully diluted value above $1m, and just 1.2% of the day’s launches graduated to a proper exchange.^{3UnchainedMost users keep losing money on Pump.fun despite the protocol's record profits20 Aug 2024} Solidus judged that 98.6% of the tokens it examined were pump-and-dump schemes or rug pulls, in which creators sell into buyers’ enthusiasm and leave.^{1Forklog (citing Solidus Labs)Report: 98% of Pump.fun's memecoins deemed scams8 May 2025} The average rug pull on Raydium, a large Solana exchange, cost victims $2,832.^{1Forklog (citing Solidus Labs)Report: 98% of Pump.fun's memecoins deemed scams8 May 2025} That is an unremarkable sum for an adult. It is a term’s worth of pocket money for a teenager.

Traders fare little better. A Dune Analytics dashboard compiled by an analyst known as Adam Tehc found that, of more than 13.4m wallets on Pump.fun, 55,012 had realised profits above $10,000, about 0.4%, and 294 had cleared $1m.^{2DecryptPump.fun traders millionaires10 Jan 2025} Five months earlier the same dashboard counted 70 such millionaires, so the winners are real and are multiplying.^{2DecryptPump.fun traders millionaires10 Jan 2025} By August 2024 more than two-thirds of wallets were unprofitable.^{3UnchainedMost users keep losing money on Pump.fun despite the protocol's record profits20 Aug 2024}

The strongest objection comes from Pump.fun’s own co-founder, Alon Cohen. He argues that the dashboard misses gains made after tokens “graduate” and that the true number of profitable wallets could be “an order of magnitude LARGER”.^{2DecryptPump.fun traders millionaires10 Jan 2025} He also notes that about 30% of wallets placed a single sell order and are unlikely to be human.^{2DecryptPump.fun traders millionaires10 Jan 2025} Both points are fair. Counting bots removes some losers from the denominator, and counting post-graduation trades would add some winners. They would need to add a great many to turn a lottery into a livelihood. The analyst’s own summary was that anyone who is profitable is “already outperforming most”.^{3UnchainedMost users keep losing money on Pump.fun despite the protocol's record profits20 Aug 2024}

There is also the defence that this is education. The young learn about risk cheaply, the argument goes, in a market where the stakes are small. Some do. Stakes of a few thousand dollars are, however, rather large for a person with no income, and the lesson on offer is not that risk is expensive. It is that the clever move is to sell before everyone else, which is how the child in our opening story made a profit and then watched the crowd make the rest.

None of this calls for a ban. Pump.fun is a legal business serving willing customers, and the people who lose money on it are, by and large, losing it to each other. It does call for plain labelling. A platform that collects fees on every launch, and now holds a $4bn token of its own, should be required to say, at the point of sale and in the language of a teenager, that about one launch in 70 keeps its liquidity.

The house always wins. It is merely better dressed than it used to be.