Memecoin Platform Pump.fun Raises $600 Million in Just 12 Minutes
In a week when Bitcoin achieved a new all-time high, the crypto community demonstrated its ongoing intrigue with quirky and irreverent coins that typically lack genuine utility.
On Saturday, Pump.fun—a Solana blockchain platform enabling users to create their own customized memecoins—successfully raised $600 million in just 12 minutes during a public token sale, according to Bloomberg. This brings the platform’s total fundraising to an impressive $1.32 billion, following the sale of 180 billion tokens to private investors at the uniform price of $0.004 per token.
This sale is among the largest initial coin offerings (ICOs) ever recorded in the cryptocurrency realm.
Pump.fun announced the sale on X (formerly Twitter) on July 9, indicating that investors from the U.S. and U.K. were excluded—likely to avoid regulatory complications, even with the White House’s generally favorable outlook toward the crypto industry and former President Donald Trump’s associations with memecoins.
Founded in 2024 by Alon Cohen, Noah Tweedale, and Dylan Kerler, Pump.fun has transformed into a prolific creator of memecoins and a notable revenue source. The platform has reportedly generated nearly $800 million in revenue since launch by enabling retail traders to create and trade joke tokens at their convenience.
Memecoins—cryptocurrency tokens often inspired by memes, celebrities, or internet humor—continue to attract speculative investments, despite their commonly limited functionality and likelihood of steep price drops. For example, the Official Trump coin (TRUMP) is currently trading close to its yearly lows.
Pump.fun’s swift rise occurs amid a resurgence of ICO-style fundraising, which waned following the 2018 market bubble and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement actions under former SEC chair Gary Gensler.
The current environment presents a different scenario. The present Trump administration indicates strong backing for crypto (funding treasury initiatives, meme coins, stablecoins), and Pump.fun is evidently capitalizing on this trend.
This week, the startup celebrated its first acquisition by obtaining Kolscan, a wallet analytics tool. This acquisition allows for real-time monitoring of leading on-chain traders—often termed key opinion leaders (KOLs)—as part of Pump.fun’s expanding toolkit.
Kolscan offers wallet-level analytics, live transaction tracking, and a leaderboard that ranks Solana traders based on their profits and losses. Pump.fun intends to utilize these features to deliver “entirely new experiences” for users while enhancing social, gamified trading.
Co-founder Cohen highlighted the acquisition of Kolscan as part of a broader vision: “on-chain trading is a social sport.”
Furthermore, Bitget Wallet has recently launched MemeScan, a mobile-first trading app targeted at high-volume and early-stage meme coin traders. Designed with advanced users in mind, MemeScan integrates directly with Pump.fun, establishing it as the foremost meme coin launchpad to collaborate with this innovative platform.
As of now, Pump tokens are expected to be tradable 48 to 72 hours post-sale, based on the company’s update via X on July 9.
The choice to execute a token sale has not been without criticism. Cohen previously described presales as “scams,” a stance some community members find contradictory. Additional controversy arose when Gate.io briefly listed PUMP for pre-market trading, only to subsequently delist it and refund users, citing ongoing discussions with Pump.fun.
