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The Crazy Rise of Memecoin Factory Pump.Fun

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The Crazy Rise of Memecoin Factory Pump.Fun

in one of The strangest margins of the Internet, a unicorn with human breaststo cheetah smoking a cigaretteand a animated Elon Musk With a traditional cape they sit next to each other: the cast of a bad trip. A Word Art banner heads the page, a floating anachronism. Icons glow, vibrate, bounce, and otherwise evade the pursuing eye. Barely readable messages appear in green, red and yellow and then disappear.

However, behind this belch of Internet weirdness and low-fidelity web design lies one of the fastest growing cryptocurrency businesses Ever: Pump.Fun, a platform for launching memecoins, a type of cryptographic currency whose value rises and falls in line with the popularity of the memes it references.

The platform went live in January 2024. In the 12 months since then, third parties have reported that it has incorporated over $350 million in revenue through a 1 percent cut in operations.

Pump.Fun is the brainchild of three entrepreneurs in their early twenties: Noah Tweedale, Alon Cohen, and Dylan Kerler. The trio started out as memecoin traders, but grew tired of repeatedly falling victim to rug pulling, a type of scam in which a coin issuer steals funds, leaving investors sitting with worthless tokens.

“Buying memecoins was very unsafe… It was all designed to take money from people,” Tweedale told WIRED in an interview late last year. “The idea with Pump was to build something where everyone was on the same playing field.”

The three Pump.Fun co-founders, who met in England, have attempted to keep their identities secret: Tweedale and Cohen continue to make public their respective online pseudonyms, Sapijiju and A1on, while Kerler has little public association with Pump.Fun. But their names came up last year in corporate documents linked to the operation.

Tweedale agreed to meet with WIRED, but only on the condition that his whereabouts and details of his appearance remain undisclosed. When we met, he seemed serious but a little nervous and talked a mile a minute. He declined to answer questions about where the Pump.Fun operation is located or how many people it employs.

The secrecy is partly a reflection of a common attitude in the cryptosphere that the right to privacy is sacred, Tweedale says. But it’s also about “personal safety,” he says. In theory, the amount of cryptocurrency passing through Pump.Fun wallets could make the team a target for potential extortionists.

The intention is for the founders to become more public in the future, Tweedale says. But in the meantime, there’s the question of how best to reinvest the money Pump.Fun has earned to strengthen and expand the platform in the face of increased scrutiny and inevitable growing pains. “We are not here to make a quick buck, close the website and run. We want to build something that lasts,” says Tweedale.

The long-term vision, he says, is to transform Pump.Fun from a one-dimensional memecoin launchpad to a competitor to larger social platforms, but where most of the revenue flows to users and creators. “Imagine Instagram or TikTok, where you can invest in everything,” Tweedale says. “The Pump UI (everything we have so far) is the first possible version of what we can imagine we want to do.”

Before Pump.Fun, relatively few memecoins reached the market; just Dogecoin, the original memecoin and a handful of others, like shiba inu, Pepeand bonk—achieved some kind of prominence. The complexity of developing a memecoin and the cost of providing the liquidity needed to make it easily tradable limited the amount released.

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