Is the income of pump.fun real, earning a million dollars a day despite the market downturn?

Author: BlockBeats

"What other native cryptocurrency applications can make money?"

When it comes to this question, you might instinctively think of stablecoins, CEX, Perp DEX, on-chain Pokémon cards...

However, pump.fun, an application that once shone brightly during the meme craze and set one of the largest IPOs in cryptocurrency history, has begun to be easily 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 a top "money printer" among crypto-native applications. Statistics from DefiLlama show that, whether in the 24-hour, 7-day, 30-day, or 1-year timeframe, pump.fun's revenue ranks fourth, only behind Tether, Circle, and Hyperliquid.

Although various "dog-fighting" chat groups are quiet, with many going days without a single message, pump.fun's average daily revenue over the past 7 or 30 days has still exceeded one million dollars.

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

Is pump.fun's revenue real?

First, according to pump.fun's official revenue dashboard, the current revenue of pump.fun consists of three parts:

• Bonding curve revenue: Transaction fee income from new tokens before graduation, where pump.fun charges a protocol fee of 0.95% on this part.

• Pumpswap revenue: For new tokens that have successfully graduated (migrated to Pumpswap AMM for trading), a protocol fee of 0.93% is charged on tokens with a market cap of 0-420 SOL.

• Terminal (Padre) revenue: pump.fun acquired the trading terminal Padre last October and rebranded it as a multi-chain trading platform Terminal; since then, the revenue from this trading platform has also been included in pump.fun's revenue.

• Revenue is net of referral commissions and trading rebates.

For the bonding curve stage's protocol revenue, the Solana address used by pump.fun to receive this part of the revenue is CebN5WGQ4jvEPvsVU4EoHEpgzq1VV7AbicfhtW4xC9iM. The bonding curve revenue aggregated to this address is hardcoded in the contract. If there were to be fake revenue through external transfers to this address, there would definitely be external addresses directly calling the System Program's Transfer instruction. After analyzing the transactions to this address, we did not find any behavior of fabricating revenue through simple external SOL transfers.

In other words, the bonding curve revenue indeed comes entirely from real contract calls' protocol fee deductions.

DefiLlama's pump.fun bonding curve revenue data is directly calling pump.fun's official API, which is why we first conducted on-chain analysis of pump.fun's official bonding curve revenue address. However, DefiLlama calculates the revenue from Pumpswap and Terminal (Padre) by querying Solana chain data through Dune SQL, completely independent of pump.fun's official API, providing a high degree of on-chain objectivity and immutability.

At this point, we have ruled out the suspicion that pump.fun is faking revenue through "external transfers" or "falsifying data," but they still have the possibility of generating fake revenue through "self-buying and selling" via bots or internal wallets. Therefore, we need to ask further—given the current overall sluggishness of the cryptocurrency market and the significant decline in meme coin popularity, is pump.fun's revenue real and organic?

The reasonableness of pump.fun's revenue in the current market environment?

According to data from token terminal, in the first quarter of this year, the number of daily active addresses on Solana stabilized between 1.2 million and 2.2 million, while pump.fun had about 150,000.

At the same time, according to the data from the pump.fun-related statistics dashboard on Dune, these 150,000 addresses correspond to an average of about 30,000 new token deployments daily.

This means that if 30,000 new tokens are completely deployed by different real users every day, then about 20% of the active users on pump.fun are issuing new tokens daily. However, according to a paper published last month by Giulio Marino and others, from September 1 to October 1, 2025, a total of 655,770 new tokens were deployed on pump.fun, but the number of addresses deploying tokens was only 243,123.

Currently, the average daily deployment of tokens is even higher than in September last year:

Considering the current market environment, this data seems "counterintuitive"—while it feels like cryptocurrencies are on the verge of collapse on social media, there are still so many new tokens being deployed on pump.fun every day. Additionally, the number of active addresses over the past month is about 10% higher than in September last year.

In pump.fun's daily revenue of one million dollars, Pumpswap and Terminal (Padre) still account for a relatively "small share." For example, on March 18, the revenue from Pumpswap and Terminal (Padre) was approximately $284,000 and $58,000, respectively, while the revenue from the bonding curve was about $795,000, which is about 2.3 times the sum of the first two.

The graduation rate of new tokens has recently even reached more than twice that of last September:

On that day, about 26,000 new tokens were deployed on pump.fun. To achieve $795,000 in bonding curve revenue, a bonding curve transaction volume of approximately $83,684,200 would need to be realized, averaging about $3,218 in transaction volume contributed by each newly deployed token before successful graduation.

Considering the above data, an average contribution of just over $3,000 in transaction volume per new token doesn't sound too difficult; in fact, it seems quite normal, as pump.fun was still able to achieve this goal even in the data-lagging September of last year. If calculated in SOL terms, the SOL earned now is even more than in September last year, but the dollar-denominated revenue has decreased.

However, we still have a question: since pump.fun has been using almost all of its daily revenue for repurchasing $PUMP since last August, and has repurchased over 10% of the total supply and over 30% of the current circulating supply of $PUMP, why has the price of $PUMP continued to decline? Although we can see through on-chain data that the $PUMP worth over $300 million repurchased by pump.fun remains untouched in wallets, is it possible that they are creating fake revenue through volume manipulation while "repurchasing" and secretly selling off using dispersed addresses?

Where did the $PUMP go?

Let's take a look at the token release plan for $PUMP:

So far, the circulation 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%, approximately 50% unlocked at TGE, with the remaining portion linearly unlocked over one year; currently, this portion has been unlocked by 65.27%.

In the $PUMP multi-signature custody wallet at address Cfq1ts1iFr1eUWWBm8eFxUzm5R3YA3UvMZznwiShbgZt, there is currently approximately 36.5% of the total supply of $PUMP.

This does not align with the $PUMP token release plan. We can confirm that after TGE, all $PUMP was transferred to a multi-signature custody wallet for distribution. The theoretically maximum transferable amount is only 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% of the unlocked portion of community and ecosystem incentives), meaning the balance of $PUMP in the multi-signature custody wallet should not be less than approximately 41.33%, with a difference of about 4.83%.

Where did this 4.83% go? We don't know. We don't even know where the $PUMP with clearly defined uses, aside from the ICO sales distribution, is located. Although we have indeed found that approximately 24% of the total supply of $PUMP has been silently transferred to various addresses after large transfers, which roughly corresponds to the parts outside of the ICO sales distribution, pump.fun has never disclosed the storage addresses corresponding to the funds in each part.

Especially for the community and ecosystem incentive portion, the only publicly known community and ecosystem incentive activities are approximately $1.7 million in meme coins purchased within the pump.fun ecosystem by Glass Full Foundation, grants of $10,000 each to six meme coin communities totaling $60,000, and funding for 12 projects totaling $250,000, with a total of $3 million given but only six winning projects announced so far.

However, this part is already the clearest...

But even with such transparency issues, even if 4.83% has been secretly sold off, the large-scale repurchase of over 10% of the total supply and over 30% of the current circulating supply by pump.fun should be able to offset this selling pressure. Why does the price of $PUMP still remain sluggish?

A possible reason is that $PUMP indeed does not have enough buying power; large-scale repurchases, in the absence of market recognition, may also disappear without a trace.

An unrecognized "casino"

When it comes to Hyperliquid, we can affirm its leading position and narrative potential in the Perp DEX space, but in the meme coin track of pump.fun, even retail investors largely consider it a scam and unsustainable.

In the earlier parts of the article, we acknowledged the authenticity of pump.fun's revenue; now we need to look at some other data. This data can illustrate that the poor perception of meme coins is not just a simple emotional aversion from retail investors experiencing the extreme volatility of meme coins, but can also lead to rational resistance from institutional investors.

As early as last April, research from Medallion Analytics indicated that during a 180-day statistical period, approximately 178,000 deployers launched multiple tokens, with 85.3% of them being profitable. Over the 180 days, these deployers launched a total of about 3.59 million tokens, with profitable deployers accounting for about 3.07 million of them, a ratio of about 85.5%.

During the statistical period, the top 10 profitable deployers earned about 365,000 SOL, while the 10 deployers with moderate performance could only earn 47.3 SOL, a difference of about 7,720 times. For the top deployers, the average interval for issuing new tokens was only 0.11 hours, while moderate deployers took as long as 10.96 hours.

Solidus Labs studied the performance of newly deployed tokens on pump.fun from January 2024 to March 2025. The research analysis pointed out that as much as 98.6% of the tokens are scams designed to inflate and dump.

The issuance of meme coins has long ceased to be a competition of creativity, but rather a profit-making assembly line. Top deployers can quickly profit in a very short cycle and then reinvest the funds into automated token issuance facilities, accelerating their harvesting speed.

pump.fun has reduced the cost of issuing new meme coins on Solana to $2 or even less, which is indeed a technological advancement, but they have not guided the meme coin track towards a healthy direction, allowing retail and institutional investors to believe that meme coins are indeed a cultural or even belief asset. They have attempted to expand the track to live streaming coins, ICM coins, and the recent AI Agent coins, but none of these attempts have been successful.

The data is there; the most money they make is still by providing "low-cost harvesting tools," just like a casino takes a cut.

For pump.fun, every time a deployer issues a new coin or inflates fake volume before the token graduates, they can earn a risk-free return of 0.95%. If you want to give the token more exposure, you need to inflate more volume, providing pump.fun with more revenue. The funds in this ecosystem are real, the revenue is real, but the ecosystem itself is non-organic, and retail investors are the ones who get hurt. For institutional investors, such an ecosystem lacks a healthy, sustainable long-term foundation, which may be the fundamental reason for the low price of pump.fun.

In the end, we have one more question:

Since pump.fun's repurchase cannot boost the token price, would it be better to use daily revenue as staking rewards instead of the current repurchase?

Maybe, but perhaps they no longer care.