On one of the foreign edges of the internet, a unicorn with human breasts, a cheetah smoking a cigarette, and an animated Elon Musk in a traditional robe sit cheek-by-jowl-the cast of a bad trip. Banner of Word Art above the page, floating anachronism. The icon glitters, shimmy, bounces, and otherwise evades pursuing eyes. A barely legible message flashed in green, red and yellow, then disappeared. But beneath the strangeness of the Internet and low-fi web design is one of the fastest growing cryptocurrency businesses: Pump.Fun, a platform to launch memecoin, a type of crypto coin whose value rises and falls in line with the popularity of the memes it refers to. The platform is live in January 2024. In the 12 months since, it has been reported by a third party to have brought in more than $350 million in revenue through 1 Cut percent of trade.Pump.Fun is the creation of three entrepreneurs in their early twenties: Noah Tweedale, Alon Cohen , and Dylan Kerler . The trio started out as memecoin traders themselves, but grew tired of repeatedly falling victim to carpet-pulling scams where coin-miners steal funds, leaving investors sitting on worthless tokens. … All of this is designed to suck money out of people,” Tweedale told WIRED in an interview late last year. “The idea with Pump is to build something where everyone is on the same playing field.” The three founders of Pump.Fun, who met in the UK, have tried to keep their identities secret—Tweedale and Cohen continue to be publicly disclosed by their respective owners. online pseudonyms, Sapijiju and A1on, while Kerler has little public association with Pump.Fun. But his name appeared last year in company documents related to the operation. Tweedale agreed to meet with WIRED, but only on the condition that the location and details of his appearance remain anonymous. When we met, he came across as earnest but somewhat on-edge-and he spoke at a mile a minute. He declined to answer questions about where Pump.Fun’s operations are based or how many people it employs. The secrecy is partly a reflection of the general attitude in the cryptosphere that the right to privacy is sacrosanct, Tweedale claims. But it’s also about “personal safety and security,” he said. In theory, the amount of crypto passing through the Pump.Fun wallet could make the team a target for extortionists. The goal is for the founders to be more public-facing in the future, Tweedale said. But in the meantime, there is a matter of how best to reinvest the money that Pump.Fun has made to both harden and expand the platform in the face of increased scrutiny and inevitable pain. “We’re not here to make a quick buck, close the website, and run away. We want to build something that lasts,” Tweedale said. The long-term vision, he claims, is to transform Pump.Fun from a one-dimensional memecoin launchpad into a competitor to the largest social platform, but where the lion’s share of the profits are. flows to users and creators. “Imagine Instagram or TikTok, where everything can be invested,” Tweedale said. “Pump’s UI—everything we have so far—is the earliest version of what you can imagine trying to do.”Before Pump.Fun, several memecoins hit the market; only Dogecoin, the original memecoin, and a few others—like Shiba Inu, Pepe, and Bonk—achieved any kind of significance. The complexity of developing memecoin and the cost of providing the necessary liquidity to make it easy to trade is limited by the amount released.
