Pump.fun Is All of the Internet’s Worst Impulses on One Site

In the trenches of the livestream meta, one man reigns supreme. Livestreaming from a sparse room in California, a Trump 2024 flag pinned above a mattress on a floor, Trevv freebased using a birthday candle sticking out of a woman’s ass to heat up the drugs. “I made a wish,” Trevv said after he inhaled. “All the drugs I could ever, ever want.” Trevv was live on a website called Pump.fun, trying to take a new memecoin he’d created to a high market cap.

Pump.fun is a website founded in 2024 where users can create a new Solana-based memecoin with the click of a few buttons. Then they can livestream to an audience on the website with the goal of pumping the coin. There is no moderation, no rules, and no restraint. It’s going exactly how you’d imagine.

People are streaming the kinds of things that are normally taboo on the mainstream internet. One dev is sitting on a toilet until his coin reaches a $50 million market cap. This is SHITCOIN and if the timer behind him is to be believed, he’s been there for 82 hours.

There’s a guy who smokes meth on stream, a drunk lawyer who gives shitty legal advice that degenerates the longer the stream goes on, and a guy promising not to sleep until his coin hits a $10 million market cap. There is, of course, sex and porn on Pump.fun, but there’s also a lot of darker stuff.

something bad is gonna happen on pumpfun eventually, just a matter of time pic.twitter.com/vbKdLXi59q

— DANIEL GOT HITS (@danielgothits) November 25, 2024

Pump.fun was launched in January of 2024 by an anonymous person who goes by Alon on X. “My ultimate goal is for pump dot fun to be the most fun place on the internet,” they said on X in February. “If I don’t achieve this then I have failed.”

Pump.fun is fun in the way that the Roman coliseum was fun. Pump.fun is fun in the way Bumfights was fun. There are wholesome streams of people playing music or showing off their pets, sure, but there’s also a lot of violence and depravity. Trevv’s current method of juicing coins is walking into public spaces in blackface and screaming racial slurs.

The lack of moderation makes this stuff possible, but so does the low barrier to entry. Anyone can create a meme coin for free. A user just needs to hit the create button, name their memecoin and come up with a ticker. You can also add a description, links to socials, and an image but these are not required. Once created, a user can start livestreaming to pump the coin.

The goal here, according to a pop-up on the site is to prevent rug pulls. Getting rugged refers to the practice of a creator juicing a coin then selling their stake in it after people invest and the coin’s value spikes. “Pump prevents rugs by making sure that all created tokens are safe. each coin on pump is a fair-launch with no presale and no team allocation,” the site says.

There have, of course, been some rug pulls on Pump.fun. The most famous happened last week when the site became enchanted by a young kid who was hyping a coin. “Just made $2k before school,” the kid said in a post on X. “Lock in.” He showed off a balance on his phone north of $2,000. Crypto accounts on X loved this.

The kid launched GenZ QUAINT on Pump.fun and it took off. When it hit a market cap of $1 million, the kid flipped off the stream and sold his stake. “Thanks for the 20 bandos,” he said as he jumped around the room. The crypto accounts who’d shown the kid love were pissed and they got their revenge by pumping QUAINT. It hit a market cap of $85 million in a few hours. If the kid had held steady he could have made millions.

The kid became a meme legend that even the Pump.fun official account on X memed on. “Got rugged by a 12 year old then realised it doesn’t matter because I’m a chill guy,” it said in a post on X.

got rugged by a 12 year old then realised it doesn't matter because I'm just a chill guy pic.twitter.com/YYRePM5TBR

— pump.fun (@pumpdotfun) November 20, 2024

A 12-year-old doing a rug pull on a crypto site is funny, yeah, but it’s also weird. Maybe I’m getting soft as I age but I don’t think a literal child should have access to the tools to do financial fraud for a live audience. It’s hard to imagine a world where the fun of Pump.fun continues unabated and unregulated, but who knows? We live in wild times. Pump.fun’s popularity is a reflection of that.

People threaten to do violence to themselves or others on the site. There’s been at least one staged hanging. Crypto accounts on X murmur about a livestream where a couple abused a 3-year-old child in an effort to drive up the price of their coin. A kid threatened to kill his family with a shotgun to drive up the price of his coin. One dev paraded a woman he said was his mother naked on camera to drive hype. Another revealed his alleged sister’s breasts when his coin hit a milestone. Another dev, Mikol, set himself on fire live on camera and went to the hospital with third-degree burns.

“With the live streaming meta on in full force there have been many people that came forward with some very legitimate concerns regarding what content is allowed on the platform,” Alon said in a post on X. “Let me make it abundantly clear: we actively moderate illicit content on the site. that includes images, videos, live streams, and comments.”

The line between what is violent and harmful and what is merely distasteful will be discovered live on camera, every day on Pump.fun, for the foreseeable future. And a lot of people will make money doing it.