Pumpfun Surges to 1.3M Traders in August While Retail Users Bleed $66M

Memecoin madness hits new peak as Pumpfun's trader count explodes—but the house always wins.

The Retail Reality Check

While the platform celebrated record participation, retail investors collectively watched $66 million vanish into the crypto ether. Another day, another dollar lost chasing the next dog-themed miracle.

Speculation Nation

Active verbs dominate the action: traders flood in, liquidity pumps, fortunes evaporate. The platform cuts through traditional barriers while users bypass common sense in pursuit of overnight riches.

Welcome to decentralized finance—where the only thing more predictable than hype cycles is the transfer of wealth from amateurs to professionals. Just another reminder that in crypto, someone's life-changing gain usually means someone else's rent money gone forever.

Some traders did see gains, though not nearly enough to offset the losses. Around 416,000 addresses earned up to $1,000 each, averaging less than $100 in profit. About 18,000 wallets made between $1,000 and $10,000, and just 1,665 addresses netted over $10,000. Despite these pockets of profit, the heavy losses dominated, leaving the platform with a net loss of $66 million for the month.

Buybacks strengthen the platform but hurt traders

PumpFun has already tried to bolster its token economy. In August, it carried out $58.7 million in buybacks of its PUMP token, bringing the repurchases total to more than $66.6 million. More than 17,657 billion tokens were bought back at an average price of $0.003765.

The MOVE was intended to take selling pressure off the token and stabilize its price. But despite bolstering market confidence, such a shift didn’t deliver profits for most traders. The month still ended with heavy losses in all of these names, meaning that the growth in PumpFun is more helpful to the platform than it is to its retail customers.

Financially, PumpFun itself is thriving. Now holding more than $800 million in lifetime fees, most of this has been raised in the FORM of its 1% swap fee for token trades.

This is evident following new data that showed that the platform accounted for 46.6% of Solana’s August launchpad market share. Its closest competitor, LetsBonk, has less than 9% with almost $100 million in volume.

The platform’s community is also growing. Now more than 71,000 wallets contain PUMP tokens, and a large percentage of the ownership is retail investors. Nearly half of all PUMP tokens are in smaller wallets with less than 1,000 tokens each, indicating that grassroots participation is increasing.

PumpFun faces regulatory scrutiny

PumpFuns’ achievement comes as it is facing continued legal scrutiny. A class-action lawsuit, filed earlier this year, alleges that the platform runs like an “unlicensed casino.” The token mechanics of PumpFun resemble a “rigged slot machine,” according to plaintiffs, with investors assuming the risk of losses.

The suit, an amended complaint filed in July, suggests that total investor losses elsewhere on the platform may be as high as $5.5 billion. It’s a dominance that has allowed PumpFun to grow its revenues, but the lawsuit has also cast a long shadow over its future.

As earlier reported by Cryptopolitan, two law firms, Wolf Popper and Burwick Law, recently expanded the lawsuit against PumpFun to include Solana Labs, the Solana Foundation, and Jito. Key figures from the Solana community, including co-founders Raj Gokal and Anatoly Yakovenko, have also been named.

In an amended complaint, the firms claimed that Yakovenko and Gokal violated the RICO Act. Dan Albert, Lily Liu, and Austin Federa at the Solana Foundation are also named in the suit.

The RICO claims include illegal gambling, wire fraud, intellectual property theft, and unlicensed money transmission. The complaint also contains allegations of securities violations and claims of violations of New York General Business Law sections 349 and 350.

August highlighted PumpFun’s paradox. On the one hand, the platform is as strong as ever in terms of users, revenue, and market share. On the other hand, it has traders who are almost universally unprofitable, costing themselves millions of dollars in aggregate losses.

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