Is pump.fun's Revenue Real? Still Making Millions Daily Despite Market Downturn

作者：BlockBeats

“Are there any other native cryptocurrency applications that can make money?”

When it comes to this question, your instinctive reaction might be—stablecoins, CEX, Perp DEX, on-chain Pokémon cards…

And pump.fun, which once shined brightly during the meme craze and achieved one of the largest IPOs in cryptocurrency history, is starting to be forgotten. In some conversations, I even heard questions like:

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

Not only can pump.fun still make money, but it remains one of the top “money printers” among native crypto applications. According to data from DefiLlama, in any time frame—24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, or 1 year—pump.fun’s revenue ranks just behind Tether, Circle, and Hyperliquid, holding the 4th position.

Although various “dog-whistle” chat groups are quiet, with many not speaking for days, over the past 7 or 30 days, pump.fun’s daily average revenue still exceeds one million USD.

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

Is pump.fun’s income genuine?

First, according to pump.fun’s official revenue dashboard, pump.fun’s income is composed of three parts:

• Bonding curve revenue: transaction fees before new tokens graduate, with pump.fun charging a protocol fee of 0.95% on these transactions.

• Pumpswap revenue: for tokens that have successfully graduated and migrated 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 last October and rebranded it as a multi-chain trading platform called Terminal. Revenue from this platform is also included in pump.fun’s income.

• Revenue deductions include referral commissions and trading cashback.

For bonding curve protocol income, pump.fun’s official address on Solana used to receive this part of the revenue is CebN5WGQ4jvEPvsVU4EoHEpgzq1VV7AbicfhtW4xC9iM. The bonding curve income collected at this address is hardcoded in the contract. If external funds were transferred into this address to fake income, there would be external addresses directly calling the System Program’s Transfer instruction. After analyzing transactions on this address, we found no evidence of fake income through simple external SOL transfers.

In other words, bonding curve income is entirely derived from genuine protocol fee calls.

The data from DefiLlama on pump.fun’s bonding curve income is obtained directly via pump.fun’s official API, which is why we first analyzed the on-chain data of pump.fun’s official bonding curve address. However, for Pumpswap and Terminal (Padre), DefiLlama calculates income through Dune SQL queries on Solana blockchain data, independent of pump.fun’s API, ensuring high on-chain objectivity and immutability.

At this point, we’ve eliminated the suspicion that pump.fun is faking income through “external transfers” or “data manipulation.” However, there’s still a possibility that they might generate fake income via bots or internal wallets engaging in “self-buying and self-selling.” Therefore, we must ask—given the overall bearish market environment, with meme coins losing popularity significantly, is pump.fun’s income real and organic?

Is pump.fun’s current revenue reasonable in the market environment?

According to Token Terminal, in the first quarter of this year, Solana’s daily active addresses ranged between 1.2 million and 2.2 million, while pump.fun’s was about 150,000.

Additionally, data from pump.fun’s dashboard on Dune shows that these 150,000 addresses correspond to roughly 30,000 new tokens deployed daily.

This implies that if 30,000 new tokens are deployed each day by entirely different real users, then about 20% of active users on pump.fun are deploying new tokens daily. However, according to a paper by Giulio Marino et al. published last month, from September 1 to October 1, 2025, approximately 655,770 new tokens were deployed on pump.fun, but only 243,123 addresses were involved in deploying these tokens.

Moreover, the current daily deployment of tokens is higher than in September last year:

Considering the current market conditions, this data seems counterintuitive—despite the widespread perception that crypto is doomed on social media, so many new tokens are still being deployed daily on pump.fun. Over the past month, active addresses are also about 10% higher than in September last year.

In pump.fun’s daily revenue of over a million USD, Pumpswap and Terminal (Padre) account for a relatively small portion. For example, on March 18, Pumpswap and Terminal (Padre) earned about $284,000 and $58,000 respectively, while bonding curve revenue was about $795,000—more than 2.3 times the combined income of the first two.

The graduation rate of new tokens has even doubled compared to September last year:

On that day, about 26,000 new tokens were deployed on pump.fun. To generate $795,000 in bonding curve revenue at a fee rate of 0.95%, the total bonding curve trading volume would need to be approximately $83.68 million. Dividing this volume evenly across the newly deployed tokens, each token would need to contribute about $3,218 in trading volume before graduation.

Given this data, it’s not unreasonable for each new token to generate around $3,000 in trading volume—especially since, in September last year, pump.fun was able to achieve this. If calculated in SOL, the current earnings in SOL are even higher than last September, but USD-denominated income has decreased.

However, a lingering question remains: pump.fun has been using nearly all daily income to buy back $PUMP tokens since August last year, repurchasing over 10% of the total supply and over 30% of the circulating supply. Why, then, does the price of $PUMP keep falling? Although on-chain data shows that pump.fun’s buybacks, worth over $300 million, are sitting in wallets untouched, is it possible they are artificially inflating income and secretly dumping through scattered addresses while doing buybacks?

Where did the $PUMP go?

Let’s look at the token release schedule of $PUMP:

So far, the distribution of $PUMP is as follows:

• ICO: 33%, fully unlocked at TGE

• Team: 20%, still locked

• Investors: 13%, still locked

• LP and exchanges: 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%, about 50% unlocked at TGE, remaining linearly unlocked over 1 year, with 65.27% unlocked so far

The address Cfq1ts1iFr1eUWWBm8eFxUzm5R3YA3UvMZznwiShbgZt, which holds $PUMP in a multi-signature escrow wallet, still has about 36.5% of the total supply.

This does not align with the token release schedule. We can confirm that after TGE, all $PUMP tokens were transferred to the multi-signature escrow wallet for distribution. The maximum transferable amount should be about 58.67% of the total supply (ICO 33% + LP and exchanges 2.6% + ecosystem fund 2.4% + live support 3% + foundation 2% + approximately 15.67% unlocked from community and ecosystem incentives). Therefore, the $PUMP balance in the escrow wallet should not be less than about 41.33%. The difference is roughly 4.83%.

Where did this 4.83% go? We don’t know. We even don’t know where the remaining $PUMP, which has clear designated purposes besides ICO sales, is located. Although on-chain data shows that about 24% of the total supply has been transferred to large addresses and has remained silent for a long time—roughly matching the non-ICO distribution—pump.fun’s official disclosures have never revealed the specific addresses holding these funds.

Particularly for the community and ecosystem incentives, the only publicly known activities are: the Glass Full Foundation (which has bought about $1.7 million worth of meme tokens within pump.fun), grants of $10,000 each to six meme communities totaling $60,000, and funding for 12 projects totaling $250,000, with a total announced prize pool of $3 million for hackathons, but only six winning projects have been announced so far.

This is the clearest information we have…

Even with these transparency issues, even if the 4.83% has been secretly sold, pump.fun’s large-scale buybacks—over 10% of total supply and over 30% of circulating supply—should offset this selling pressure. Yet, why does $PUMP’s price remain sluggish?

The possible reason is that $PUMP simply lacks sufficient buy-side support. Large buybacks, in the absence of market recognition, are ineffective—like water pouring into a broken vessel.

Unrecognized “casino”

Regarding Hyperliquid, we acknowledge its leading position in Perp DEX and narrative potential, but in the meme coin sector, even retail investors mostly see it as a scam—unsustainable.

While we previously confirmed the authenticity of pump.fun’s income, we need to examine other data. These data points suggest that the negative perception of meme coins isn’t just retail emotional reaction to volatility but also causes institutional investors to rationally resist.

As early as April last year, Medallion Analytics’ research showed that over a 180-day period, about 178,000 deployers launched multiple tokens, with 85.3% of them profitable. During this period, these deployers created approximately 3.59 million tokens, with about 3.07 million being profitable—roughly 85.5%.

Among these, the top 10 profitable deployers earned about 36,500 SOL, while the middle 10 only earned 47.3 SOL—a difference of about 7,720 times. The top deployers have an average interval of just 0.11 hours between new token launches, whereas mid-tier deployers take about 10.96 hours.

Solidus Labs studied the performance of newly deployed tokens on pump.fun from January 2024 to March 2025. Their analysis indicates that up to 98.6% of tokens are scams designed to pump and dump.

The issuance of meme coins is no longer about creativity but about profit from rapid, automated issuance. Top deployers quickly profit within short cycles and reinvest in automated token creation tools, accelerating their harvesting speed.

Pump.fun has reduced the cost of launching new meme coins on Solana to $2 or less—an advancement in technology. However, they haven’t steered the meme coin sector toward a healthy, sustainable direction that would convince retail and institutional investors that meme coins are cultural or even faith-based assets. They’ve attempted to expand into live-streaming coins, ICM coins, and recently AI Agent coins, but none of these efforts have succeeded.

The data is clear: their biggest earnings come from providing “low-cost harvesting tools,” much like a casino siphoning off funds.

For pump.fun, each new deployment and every fake volume before token graduation guarantees a risk-free 0.95% profit. If you want more exposure for your tokens, you need to generate more fake volume, which in turn increases pump.fun’s revenue. The funds in this ecosystem are real, and the income is real, but the ecosystem itself is non-organic, and retail investors are harmed. For institutional investors, such an ecosystem lacks a healthy, sustainable long-term foundation—perhaps the root cause of pump.fun’s low token price.

Finally, we have one more question:

If pump.fun’s buybacks can’t boost the price, wouldn’t using daily income for staking rewards be a better approach than current buybacks?

Maybe so, or maybe they just don’t care anymore.