Pump.fun Turned 98% of Its Tokens Into Scams and Still Made a Billion Dollars

A token launchpad where 98.6% of the tokens eventually become scams should not exist, let alone thrive. Pump.fun does both. It just became the first application in Solana's history to cross a billion dollars in cumulative revenue, built on a token launch model that reliably vaporizes almost everyone who touches it. The scam rate isn't a flaw the company is racing to fix. It's the exhaust from an engine that runs exactly as designed.

Understand Pump.fun and you understand the whole speculative machine in miniature. Anyone can mint a memecoin in under a minute for about two dollars. No code, no team, no product, no promise beyond a name and a picture. Since early 2024 the platform has spun up more than 11.9 million tokens and, at peak, accounted for 71% of all daily token launches on Solana. Volume is the product. Quality was never on the menu.

The house always graduates

The genius of the design is that Pump.fun makes money on the launch, not the outcome. Every coin starts on a bonding curve. Buyers push the price up, the creator often front-runs his own community, and the vast majority die before they ever reach a real exchange. The platform collects fees the entire way down.

The small fraction that survive "graduate" — enough buying pressure to migrate onto a decentralized exchange, at which point the platform takes a graduation fee of roughly 6 SOL and locks the liquidity pool tokens so that pooled liquidity can't be yanked. That single safeguard is the only thing standing between a graduated token and the most primitive rug pull, where a founder drains the pool and disappears.

Sit with that for a moment. The protective mechanism everyone points to — locked liquidity — only kicks in for the tiny minority of tokens that make it out alive. For the millions that don't, there's no lock, no floor, no recourse. The safety feature is real. It just arrives after the carnage.

A rug pull has a definition, and most of these fit it

"Rug pull" gets thrown around loosely, so be precise. It's when the people who created a token pull the value out from under the people who bought it — draining liquidity, dumping a hidden allocation, or abandoning the thing the moment the wallet is full. On a platform generating millions of tokens with no vesting, no team lockups and no accountability, that outcome isn't an aberration. Solidus Labs put a number on it, and the number is 98.6%.

Defenders will say the buyers knew. Everyone playing memecoin roulette understands the odds, the argument goes, so where's the harm? It's a fair point, up to a point. Adults can gamble. But "the victims consented" is a strange foundation for a billion-dollar business, and it's an even stranger one to hand regulators, who tend to notice when a machine produces scams at industrial scale regardless of how willing the marks were.

The bill is coming due

The consent defense is about to meet its stress test. Pump.fun is carrying a $500 million lawsuit accusing its founders of running an insider-favoring system, and a major token unlock is scheduled for July 12 into a meme market that has visibly cooled. New supply hitting weak demand is how paper valuations meet reality. The platform that industrialized the rug pull is now exposed to the exact dynamic it monetized in everyone else.

There's a grim symmetry to it. A business built on tokens with no lockups faces a reckoning over its own token's lockup schedule. The unlock doesn't drain a liquidity pool. It does something slower and just as corrosive — it tests whether the people holding PUMP believe the revenue is durable or just loud.

The problem was solved years ago, and ignored

Here's what makes the 98.6% figure infuriating rather than merely sad: the tooling to prevent most of it has existed for years. The reason rugs keep happening isn't that nobody knows how to stop them. It's that the platforms optimized for launch volume have no incentive to slow the machine down.

Locking liquidity so a founder can't drain the pool, and vesting team tokens so insiders can't dump on day one, are not exotic ideas. They're the baseline hygiene that separates a project from a trap. Services like Team Finance exist precisely to make that lock verifiable and permanent — the on-chain proof a buyer can check before committing a dollar, rather than after losing one. The technology to make "the founder can't run" a provable fact has been sitting in plain sight the entire time Pump.fun printed 11.9 million tokens without requiring any of it.

The difference is philosophical, and it shows up in the numbers. A launch process that treats vesting schedules, audited contracts and locked liquidity as prerequisites — the model a curated platform like the TrustSwap Launchpad is built around — produces fewer tokens and far fewer corpses. It's slower. It's less viral. It also doesn't generate a 98.6% scam rate, because the mechanisms that let scams happen are removed before launch instead of mourned after.

You can frame this as a market serving two different appetites, and that framing is honest. Some people want the casino, eyes open, chips down. Fine. But the industry keeps insisting it wants institutional capital, real users and regulatory legitimacy, and you cannot hold that ambition in one hand while running a token factory with a 98.6% failure rate in the other. At some point the casino's numbers become the whole industry's reputation.

Why the casino keeps winning anyway

The uncomfortable truth is that the reckless model is winning on the metric that funds everything: revenue. A billion dollars is not a rounding error. It's proof that friction loses to dopamine almost every time. Ask a builder to choose between a launch that takes a week and requires an audit, a liquidity lock and a vesting schedule, or one that takes sixty seconds and two dollars, and watch which line forms.

That's the honest counterpoint to every lecture about safety, and it deserves respect rather than dismissal. Safety has a cost — in speed, in effort, in the sheer thrill of the thing — and a large slice of the market has repeatedly voted that it would rather have the thrill. Pretending otherwise is how safety advocates keep losing the argument.

But revenue and durability are different animals. Pump.fun made its billion during an era of cheap liquidity and relentless retail appetite. The lawsuit, the unlock and the cooling market are all arriving at once, and each one asks the same question: what's left when the churn slows? A launch platform whose entire output is disposable has nothing to compound. The graduated survivors are too few. The reputation is radioactive. The token faces its own supply cliff.

The next cycle will be built by whoever the last one burned

Crypto has a habit of routing around its own worst behavior, but slowly, and only after enough people get hurt to make the alternative feel worth the friction. Every rug is a small tuition payment toward that realization. Eleven million dead tokens is a very large tuition bill, paid by a very large number of people who are now allergic to launches that can't prove their liquidity is locked and their insiders are vested.

That allergy is the opening. The platforms that treated safety as a feature rather than an inconvenience were mocked for years as slow and joyless while Pump.fun printed money. They may end up being the only launch venues left standing that a serious builder — or a returning burn victim — is willing to touch.

Pump.fun proved you can make a fortune manufacturing scams as long as everyone agrees to call it a game. The July unlock is about to find out whether the game outlives the fortune, or whether a billion dollars in revenue was just the sound of a machine converting other people's money into a very expensive lesson about what a locked liquidity pool is actually worth.