In brief
- The PUMP token has dropped 45% from its all-time high, and is now trading lower than its initial coin offering valuation.
- Pump.fun raised $600 million in 12 minutes earlier this month, selling its token for $0.004.
- It comes as users appear to be growing frustrated over the lack of airdrop details, while a rival launchpad is also gaining steam.
Just over a week after launch, Pump.fun’s token has stooped below its initial coin offering price—which raised $600 million in just 12 minutes earlier this month. This means that everyone who bought the token in that sale is now at a loss.
It comes as PUMP has dropped 15% over the past 24 hours, according to DEX Screener, to a price of $0.003767. That’s 5% lower than the ICO valuation of $0.004. It comes as the Pump.fun community appears to be growing restless that an airdrop date hasn’t been announced, and the platform continues to lose market share to new rival LetsBonk.
Pump.fun is a Solana launchpad that allows anyone to create a token by filling out a short form, free of charge. Over its 18-month lifespan, Pump.fun has generated $774 million in revenue and been used to create nearly 12 million tokens. That’s why its initial coin offering sold out in just 12 minutes, its token launch was hotly anticipated, and its confirmed airdrop was eagerly awaited.
Following its launch last Monday, the PUMP token surged 72% from its ICO price to a high price of $0.006878. In part, this jump in value was spurred by a day of buybacks worth $19.24 million from Pump.fun. Since then, the buybacks have decreased in size—to just $125,000 on Sunday—and the token’s value has sagged 45% from its all-time high.
In the official token announcement, Pump.fun confirmed that an airdrop was “coming soon.” Now, just over a week since the token launch and two weeks from the announcement, it appears that users are growing restless due to the lack of details.
Posts from the official Pump.fun X account, as well as the platform’s co-founder, Alon Cohen, are being spammed by users demanding information about the airdrop, or just asking for PUMP’s price to increase.
Cohen has also shared a couple of cryptic posts that have brought out the conspiracy theorists in the community. One post showed the co-founder’s profile picture pointing to a pyramid of Pump.fun pills, and as the theories flew about, Cohen added, “Think harder.”
“They said it would be on the 2nd, then the 12th, then the 15th, now they’re saying the 2nd again,” Cohen wrote in a second post. “Maybe you’ll figure it out.”
PUMP is now the 99th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, per CoinGecko, and is close to falling out of the top 100. Last week, its valuation was comparable to Solana meme coin BONK, which is currently the 54th biggest coin on the market.
LetsBonk, the BONK community’s Pump.fun competitor, has been responsible for the majority of tokens created via a Solana launchpad for 14 out of the last 15 days. This is the longest period that a rival launchpad has dominated market share—and not through a lack of trying.
Over the past 14 days, BONK has climbed 56.7% in valuation to a $2.7 billion market cap, over double that of PUMP at $1.3 billion. As a result, predictors on Myriad Markets believe that it is essentially guaranteed, or 96% likely, that BONK will have a larger market cap than PUMP by the end of the month.
(Disclosure: Myriad is a prediction market developed by Decrypt’s parent company DASTAN.)
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