Pump.fun Outpaces Ethereum in Daily Fee Revenue—Memecoins Eat the Giants’ Lunch

In a plot twist Wall Street analysts didn’t see coming, memecoin launchpad Pump.fun just flipped Ethereum in daily fee generation. The platform—where ’degen’ meets ’YOLO’—raked in more transaction fees than the entire ETH network yesterday.

How? A perfect storm of 10-second token launches, leveraged gambling, and that sweet, sweet dopamine hit of watching your shitcoin moon 1000% before lunch. Meanwhile, Ethereum’s Layer 2 solutions are still trying to explain what ’fragmentation’ means to institutional investors.

One hedge fund manager quipped: ’Turns out, the real ’killer app’ was gambling all along—who needs enterprise blockchain?’

Since its inception, Pump.fun regularly surpassed Ethereum in the short term. Now, the accumulated difference is even larger. The Ethereum chain received around $248M from transaction fees, including direct usage for token transfers, and any remaining rent paid by L2 protocols. 

As a result, Ethereum remains important for large-scale whales, but its daily fees to validators are only around $365,515. Most of the fees in the ecosystem are produced by apps and retained by the app team, while validators still rely on the block reward. 

Pump.fun remains top 5 fee producer

The meme token platform is also solidly within the top 5 of fee producers, with over $2.88M in daily inflows. The meme platform team continues to cash out regularly, sending SOL to centralized exchanges. 

At the same time, the entire Solana chain produces around $1.28M in daily fees, rising above $1M on average in the past two weeks. The meme ecosystem mostly boosts the fees for DEXs and aggregators, with only a fraction going to Solana validators.

The activity on Pump.fun was often singled out as extracting value from Solana’s ecosystem. However, the usage of meme tokens and DEX activity is boosting Solana fees. The platform and its DEX are one of the biggest gas burners on Solana, returning up to $2.7M in weekly fees to validators. PumpSwap already carries around 6.8% of the chain’s DEX activity, bringing additional fees to Jupiter, Jito and the basic L1 layer.

The recent growth follows the expanded trading volume, up by 37% in the past month. The platform handled $5.7B in the past 30 days, based on new launches and native trading. 

Pump.fun also hosted over 156K daily active users, up more than 18% in the past month. Compared to the recent lows, where only 1,000 addresses created tokens, the platform’s activity has grown nearly 10 times. 

A total of 9,526 addresses launched new tokens. Daily new launches ranged from 25,000 to 36,000 new memes, returning to levels not seen since Q4, 2024. 

Can Ethereum regain a meme token advantage?

Ethereum was the original network for meme token launches. However, the chain’s gas fee structure meant any increased activity would also make swaps prohibitive. Solana’s low fees leveled the playing field, achieving much faster turnover and wider adoption.

On Ethereum, new protocols are testing the waters with extremely cheap token mints. However, Base has already established itself as the meme token platform for Ethereum. Solana also takes 94.5% of meme trading volumes, with over $10B in monthly swaps. Ethereum still trades only $360M in stablecoins on decentralized exchanges.

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