The $500 million quota was grabbed in 12 minutes, why did Pump.fun attract so much money?
Author: 1912212.eth, Foresight News
On July 12, the PUMP token public sale of $500 million was sold out in just 12 minutes, and the pre-market trading price of the Binance perpetual contract is now at $0.006, an increase of nearly $2 billion compared to the initial $4 billion FDV. According to the on-chain analyst Ember monitoring, judging from the current PUMP on-chain holdings, 6 CEXs participating in the PUMP public offering may have received PUMP. These on-chain addresses currently hold: Kraken: 7.5 billion, Bitget: 7.5 billion, Gate: 6.4 billion, Bybit: 5 billion, MEXC: 5 billion, and Kucoin: 4.1 billion.
Pump.fun has quickly become a phenomenal presence in the cryptocurrency ecosystem since 2024. The platform allows anyone to create and launch Meme coins with a very low barrier to entry, bringing tokens directly to the market through a unique "fair launch" mechanism without the need for complex smart contracts or pre-sale stages.
The size of the offering is arguably the third-largest token sale in crypto history, after ICOs on some major public chains. The Pump.fun team said that the funds will be used to expand the platform, including the launch of its own DEX (PumpSwap) and the use of PUMP as the base currency of the Meme coin.
However, the success of Pump.fun has also sparked too much controversy. Critics have dismissed it as a hotbed of "retail gambling", accusing it of sucking liquidity through an infinitely fragmented market, causing countless retail investors to suffer huge losses after a brief rally. The platform founder and his team have been accused of withdrawing about $800 million through fees without offering users anything in return, such as airdrops or shares.
$500 million credit, sold out in 12 minutes
The official sale of PUMP is scheduled for July 12, and it will take only 12 minutes to complete the public sale after the official start at 22:00 Beijing time.
According to @Adam_Tehc's Dune panel data, the number of wallet addresses participating in the Pump.fun official website presale and completing KYC is 23,959, and the number of wallet addresses that successfully bought is 10,145, with an average subscription amount of $44,209. 89.7% of the PUMP token presale was completed through the official website, and only 10.3% of the total sales of each CEX were sold.
In the official website pre-sale, there were 202 addresses with a subscription amount of $1 million, 138 addresses with a subscription amount of $500,000 to $1 million, 445 addresses with $100,000 to $500,000, and 1,030 addresses with $100,000 to $100,000. Users with a subscription amount of less than $1,000 had the largest number of users, at 5,758.
Players who participated in the public sale through the official website successfully bought, but for those who bought through exchanges and other channels, it became a big injustice. From the above data, it is not difficult to see that the total sales of CEXs account for only 10%.
Some users complained that "I couldn't find the entrance when I entered Bitget, the Gate network reported an error, and Bybit was quickly snapped up". The pre-sale mechanism is deceptively simple: users submit orders through the API, and the platform allocates them based on timestamps. But the actual process is chaotic.
Within seconds of the launch of the sale, Bybit reported an API latency issue that caused orders to pile up. The result is severe overselling: the system receives orders that exceed the available supply, some users succeed in getting allocations, others are rejected. Bybit officially admitted on X that "due to unexpected API delays, the sale was oversubscribed, resulting in some users successfully receiving allocations while others were not."
Regardless of the problems in the public offering process, this public offering still shows that the community has strong funds and is willing to chase hot projects. Crypto KOL Miles Deutscher commented on PUMP's $500 million sale in 12 minutes, saying that it shows that there is still a lot of liquidity willing to participate when the right opportunity arises. Altcoins don't "die", they just need the right narrative.
The exchange is oversold, and the giant whale is playing on the chain
Subsequently, Bybit conducted a comprehensive review of the order status of all users. To ensure fairness and transparency, token distribution is strictly on a first-come, first-served basis. Within 10 minutes after Bybit confirmed the final status of the PUMP token sale, all oversubscribed funds were fully refunded. After the sale, Bybit confirmed on July 13 that all oversold funds had been refunded, and users could check the status through the platform.
Bieget also responded to the question, and Xie Jiayin responded to the PUMP public offering issue, saying that a total of 10,144 users participated in the public offering through Bitget in this round. In addition, the Bitget team finally decided to distribute the PUMP tokens proportionally.
"Today, there are several sources, saying that Pump fun raised funds from the exchange to pigeons, so it led to the failure of 6 of them, and at present, some of these exchanges plan to supply users through OTC shares, and some are still negotiating." So says KOLAB on Twitter.
THE PRE-SALE PRICE IS BASED ON $4 BILLION FDV, AND A SINGLE PUMP IS ABOUT $0.004. On the first day after the launch, many players chose to hedge, such as the well-known trader 0xSun tweeted that he hedged $1 million at a price of $0.0054.
According to the latest Binance contract data, the PUMP contract quotation once fell to around $0.004589 on July 12, and then rushed to $0.007189 on July 13, and is now hovering around $0.006. According to Lookonchain monitoring, a trader has made a profit of more than $1.5 million by going long PUMP that day. Trader 0x6b78 opened a 3x leveraged long position on PUMP a day ago and started taking profits when the price broke above $0.007.
Pump.fun users have been hit the platform for a long time. Historical data shows that more than 90% of the meme coins on the platform collapsed after the binding curve, and the sniper made millions of profits by tying up at the last moment (8-12 SOL supply) and selling on Raydium. The PUMP sale is seen as a continuation: the team withdraws fees and sells tokens, and retail investors become "exit liquidity". User X @beaniemaxi said, "Pump.fun withdraws $500 million in fees, billions of SOL forever locked pools, this is the largest withdrawal scam in crypto history."
There is also an opportunity cost to buyers: the price of Solana fell by 10% due to the $PUMP underlying matching mechanism, affecting the entire ecosystem. SOME ANALYSTS PREDICT THAT PUMP MAY HAVE SHORT-TERM UPSIDE LIKE TRUMP, BUT WEAKNESS IN THE LONG TERM.
Pre-launch: Community attitudes are polarized
The pre-launch preparation phase began in early June 2025, when Pump.fun announced the PUMP token plan through official channels. PUMP is the utility token of the Pump.fun token launch platform and exchange platform, after which fee returns, token buybacks, or other incentive equivalence mechanisms will also be considered. The maximum supply of PUMP is 1 trillion and is distributed as follows:
- 33% will be sold in the ICO
- 24% is allocated to community and ecosystem programs
- 20% is allocated to the team
- 2.4% for the Ecosystem Fund
- 2% for foundations
- 13% to existing investors
- 3% is allocated to live streaming
- 2.6% for liquidity + exchanges
According to the PUMP release schedule, the tokens allocated to the team (20%) and existing investors (13%) will be gradually unlocked starting in July 2026; The portion allocated to the Community and Ecosystem Program (24%) will be gradually unlocked from the first day of the token offering and will be distributed in July 2026; Other token shares allocated to ICOs, liquidity + exchanges, and foundations will be fully unlocked on the first day of token issuance.
The market reaction was polarized. On the one hand, Pump.fun's loyal users and meme coin enthusiasts see it as a "Max Extraction Event" and look forward to sharing the platform's future revenue through purchases. The platform has proven its profitability: $50 million in fees in May 2025 alone, with a cumulative cost of $800 million.
Meme trader Ansem tweeted that he would buy more PUMP tokens.
On the other hand, there is a surge of doubts.
Well-known crypto analysts and KOLs such as @hodl_strong and @RuneCrypto_ have publicly criticized the offering as an "exit hoax." They noted that Pump.fun has withdrawn more than $1 billion in fees from the market, but has chosen not to give back to users through an airdrop, but instead sells tokens directly. This was seen as a betrayal of the community, especially after the likes of OpenSea (which didn't launch the token in time, causing revenue to plummet by 90%). In addition, the anonymity and lack of transparency of the team exacerbated the concerns: the funds were not known for use, were they used for development or for personal cash-out? The founding partner of IOSG bluntly said that Pump.fun public offering is more like a team seeking to exit liquidity, and the project and market fundamentals cannot support the inflated valuation.
Trader Eugene also posted on his personal community, "My opinion on pump.fun is simple: just forget about it. It has been over-analyzed to the point that nothing new is new, and no matter what price it starts trading, a market cap of $4 billion is like a heavy anchor that keeps the price down. There are so many opportunities in the market today with more potential and more non-linear returns that are far more worthy of attention. Stop wasting brain cells on something that everybody is pondering."