In one strange parts of the Internet, one unicorn with human chestOne cheetah smokingand one cartoon Elon Musk in traditional robes sitting next to each other – actors of a bad trip. A Word Art banner at the top of the page, floating out of date. The icons sparkled, shimmered, bounced, and in other ways evaded the pursuing eye. Unreadable messages appear in green, red and yellow and then disappear.
However, underneath the strangeness of the Internet and low quality web design lies one fastest growing cryptocurrency business ever: Pump.Funa platform to launch memecoina cryptocurrency whose value rises and falls in accordance 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 including Revenue of more than 350 million USD through a 1% cut in transactions.
Pump.Fun is the creation of three entrepreneurs in their mid-20s: Noah Tweedale, Alon Cohen and Dylan Kerler. The trio started out as memecoin traders, but grew tired of constantly falling victim to scams—a type of scam in which the coin issuer steals money, causing investors sit on worthless tokens.
“Buying memecoins is a very unsafe thing to do… Everything is designed to suck people's money,” Tweedale told WIRED in an interview late last year. “The idea of Pump is to build something where everyone is on the same playing field.”
The three co-founders of Pump.Fun, who met in England, have managed to keep their identities secret—Tweedale and Cohen continue to go public under their respective online pseudonyms, Sapijiju and A1on, while Kerler has little public connection to Pump.Fun. But their names emerged last year in corporate documents pertaining to operations.
Tweedale agreed to meet with WIRED, but only on the condition that his whereabouts and details about his appearance not be disclosed. When we met, he seemed serious but somewhat uncomfortable – and he talked very quickly. He declined to answer questions about where Pump.Fun's operations are based or how many people it employs.
Secrecy, Tweedale claims, partly reflects the prevailing attitude in the cryptographic world that privacy is sacred. But it's also about “personal security and safety,” he said. In theory, the amount of cryptocurrency passing through the Pump.Fun wallet could make the group a target blackmailers.
Tweedale claims the aim is for the founders to become more publicly visible in the future. But in the meantime, the question is how best to reinvest the money Pump.Fun has earned to both strengthen and expand the platform in the face of growing scrutiny and growing pains. avoidable. “We are not here to make a quick buck, close the site and run away. We want to build something that will last,” Tweedale said.
The long-term vision, he claims, is to transform Pump.Fun from a one-way memecoin launchpad into a competitor to the largest social platforms, but where the largest portion of revenue flows to users and creators . “Imagine Instagram or TikTok, where everything is investable,” Tweedale said. “The Pump UI — everything we have so far — is the earliest possible version of what you could imagine we wanted to do.”
Before Pump.Fun, relatively very few memecoins hit the market; just one DogecoinThe original memecoin and several others—like Shiba Inu, pepeAnd Bonk—achieve any kind of prominence. The complexity of developing a memecoin and the cost of providing the liquidity needed to make it easily tradable has limited the number issued.