$BATON is the leading meme reflection of $PUMP, and I’m betting on it becoming one of the leading memes of this cycle. My $BATON thesis begins with my conviction in $PUMP. I’ve been in since roughly a $1.3m MC when everyone left it for dead and still have no plans to sell anytime soon as I still think it is grossly undervalued relative to the upside I see in the underlying; $PUMP The broader framework is simple: the memestock meta is here to stay, and so far, alt-paired memes have offered some of the cleanest convexity in the market. As the underlying asset reprices, attention and liquidity can flow disproportionately into its leading meme reflection. I therefore think of these memes as a form of high-beta exposure to the underlying. Stock-paired memes can offer similar convexity, but the relationship is much less direct. Public equities are ultimately driven by earnings, guidance, interest rates, institutional positioning and a host of business fundamentals that exist completely outside the CT bubble. You can see that disconnect in real time: for example, stocks are having a green day today while their associated memestocks in are all in the red. Alt pairs are cleaner. Good example is $ZCAT and $ZEC When an altcoin begins repricing aggressively, the leading meme attached to that asset can become the speculative expression of the same thesis and move much harder as attention, liquidity and reflexivity compound. That is why I don’t think it makes sense to buy a reflection meme simply because the meme itself looks cheap. The first question should always be: Is the underlying asset itself undervalued, and does it still have significant room to run? If the answer is no, then the convexity thesis becomes considerably weaker. My $BATON thesis therefore begins with my conviction in $PUMP. And this is where BATON becomes particularly interesting. Unlike many reflection trades, its underlying is a revenue-generating protocol. That means I can at least attempt to build a fundamental framework around what $PUMP should be worth. Compare that with something like $ZCAT and $ZEC. You can have a strong thesis on Zcash, but because ZEC is not a cash-flow-generating protocol, estimating precisely how undervalued it is requires a much more subjective framework around monetary premium, privacy adoption, network value and future demand. $PUMP is different cos it generates revenue. So before asking how undervalued BATON is, the more important question is: How undervalued is $PUMP? Lets take a look: $PUMP has now firmly established itself among the highest-revenue projects in Web3 outside the major stablecoin issuers (USDT and Circle), with Hyperliquid ($HYPE) its closest high-growth comparables. But the interesting part is not simply the revenue but the enormous valuation gap. Take a look: $PUMP • 7-day revenue: ~$18m • Annualized revenue: ~$936m • Market cap: ~$3bn • Revenue multiple: ~3x $HYPE • 7-day revenue: ~$15m • Annualized revenue: ~$780m • Market cap: ~$20bn • Revenue multiple: ~25x PUMP is therefore generating comparable and currently higher revenue while trading at roughly 1/8 of HYPE’s MC. Then look at the revenue engines. PUMP: Launchpad + PumpSwap + Pump Mobile HYPE: Predominantly perpetuals This is where my thesis becomes more interesting. I expect Pump.fun to continue expanding beyond its original launchpad model and eventually compete in additional high-value crypto verticals. If a perpetuals product eventually becomes part of that stack (Which i expect just like FOMO did, then PUMP would be entering one of the most profitable markets in crypto while already possessing one of the largest retail distribution engines in the industry. Now assume that during the peak of a proper bull market, weekly revenues roughly double from ~$18m to ~$35m, that gets you to roughly $1.8–$2bn in annualized revenue. Now run two scenarios. Scenario 1: Revenue doubles, but the multiple stays the same: Annualized revenue: ~$2bn Revenue multiple: 3x Implied market cap: ~$6bn Implied price: ~$0.013 Even without any meaningful multiple expansion which is extremely unlikely, PUMP could still have substantial upside purely from revenue growth. But this is the least interesting scenario to me. Scenario 2: Revenue grows and PUMP rerates toward HYPE. This is the ideal and fully expected scenario Annualized revenue: ~$2bn Revenue multiple: 20-25x Implied market cap: ~$40-$50bn Implied price: ~$0.084- $0.01 That would imply roughly a 13x from here So the PUMP thesis is not simply “number go up.” It is a combination of: 1. A protocol already approaching $1bn in annualized revenue 2. Huge valuation discount relative to one of its closest high-growth crypto comparables 3. multiple additional monetization surfaces that have yet to be fully exploited like perps 4. Enormous retail distribution. 5. Significant operating leverage when we enter peak bull cycle If revenues expand materially while the market begins assigning PUMP anything close to the valuation multiple it gives Hyperliquid, the repricing could be violent. Very very violent. At current levels, I believe $PUMP is materially undervalued and i hope that i have been able to convince you with my data and analysis. Data doesnt lie. Which brings me back to $BATON. So how undervalued is BATON? This is where things become less precise. It would be intellectually lazy for me to simply assign BATON an arbitrary percentage of PUMP’s future market cap and call that fair value. I think the cleaner way to think about BATON is as a high-beta or leveraged expression of the PUMP thesis. The difficulty is in determining what that leverage should be. Using BATON’s current price action against PUMP is not particularly useful because BATON is still a low-cap asset. At this size, its price can be dominated by liquidity, Whale manipulations, concentration and short-term sentiment rather than the movement of PUMP itself. So I looked at historical analogues. During previous SOL expansions, leading memes such as $BONK and later $FARTCOIN behaved like highly convex expressions of the broader Solana trade. When liquidity and attention rushed into SOL, those memes often appreciated by many multiples of the move in the underlying ecosystem asset, SOLANA. That does not mean there is a fixed 10x leveraged relationship between SOL and its memes but there was a clear relationship, The better way to interpret the historical data is that leading ecosystem memes can exhibit far higher movements than the underlying asset during periods of peak speculation. But there is an important difference between SOL memes and BATON. Millions of tokens sit within the Solana ecosystem. As new memes and communities are continuously created, liquidity fragments and the relationship between any individual meme and SOL inevitably weakens as time passes on and attention shifts. BATON’s thesis is more specific as It is not simply “a meme on PUMP.” Its entire identity is built around being a reflection of PUMP and that creates a much tighter narrative relationship between the meme and its underlying. So rather than claim that BATON should mechanically move 10x whatever PUMP moves, I prefer to use historical meme beta as a rough heuristic for the kind of convexity that can occur when the underlying enters price discovery and the dominant meme attached to it captures the speculative flow. If PUMP ultimately moves toward the ~$40-$50bn MC outlined above, I think BATON has the potential to move by a far greater percentage than PUMP itself. Exactly how much greater is impossible to know today but this is where market-cap ratios become useful as a sanity check. A $1bn BATON valuation against a $40bn PUMP valuation would mean BATON is worth only 2.5% of its underlying and that does not strike me as an aggressive ratio if BATON succeeds in establishing itself as the dominant PUMP reflection meme during a full bull cycle. Another way of looking at the framework: If BATON were eventually valued at roughly 2.5% of PUMP’s market cap, then at a ~$3bn PUMP valuation, that ratio alone would imply something in the region of $75m-$80m for BATON today. As of writing this, $Baton is at $8.5m MC My simple prediction is that as PUMP reprices higher, that implied value rises alongside it. Again, this is not a formula. Memes do not trade on formulas. The point is simply to create a rational framework for thinking about the magnitude of the opportunity rather than pulling a random market-cap target out of thin air. The reflections mechanism makes this thesis even more interesting Reflection tokens themselves are not new. We saw earlier iterations of the model with tokens such as SafeMoon which ran to multi billions but many of those prior structures were fundamentally circular and flawed. Rewards were often dependent on the token’s own trading activity, punitive taxes and continued speculative turnover. Once volume disappeared, the economic engine weakened with it. BATON is attempting something structurally different. The reward is not simply more BATON. The holder receives exposure to $PUMP, the asset sitting underneath the entire thesis. That creates an interesting reflexive loop for a number of reasons: 1. If PUMP appreciates, the value of the reflections increases. 2. If PUMP’s ecosystem grows, BATON’s narrative becomes stronger. 3. If BATON grows, more attention flows toward the PUMP reflection trade. And unlike a meme whose narrative eventually has to be reinvented, BATON’s identity can persist for as long as PUMP remains a culturally and economically relevant entity in web 3. I would therefore describe the thesis less as “perpetual reflections” and more as persistent memetic alignment with the underlying because that distinction matters. And then there is the tax bit: One final reason I think BATON has been designed with the long term in mind is its 1% tax. That sounds trivial when the token is small but beomes extremely important if BATON ever becomes a large-cap asset. At scale, every additional percentage point of transaction friction matters. A 1% versus 3% tax on a $5m position is a $100,000 difference. Retail may tolerate high taxes in tiny speculative tokens but large holders generally will not. If the ambition is eventually to attract 7-fig positions and serious crypto whales, CEXs and MMs, keeping transaction friction low becomes increasingly important. Finally, the part the numbers cannot capture There is also a cultural component to this thesis that no valuation framework can properly quantify. BATON sits at the heart of the Pump.fun ecosystem narrative and emerged as part of Pump.fun’s cultural response to competing launchpads and the rise of memestocks from competition and that additional context matters Crypto is not priced on fundamentals alone. Distribution, identity, narrative and community cohesion can matter just as much and sometimes much more especially for memes. And this is where BATON has surprised me the most. The community is unlike almost anything I have seen in a low-cap meme. Several of the largest holders have simply refused to sell and these large holders include people with reputations for holding high-conviction positions until the underlying thesis either plays out or breaks. The CTO leadership also adds to my conviction. Credibility matters enormously at this stage of a project, particularly when the people driving it have prior experience helping take projects from effectively 0-$100m+ i the past. None of these factors fit neatly into a any quantitative analysis but they matter. In fact, this is precisely why I think my 2.5% of PUMP market-cap framework may ultimately prove conservative. If BATON becomes the undisputed cultural reflection of PUMP, maintains a strong community and continues capturing attention as PUMP itself reprices, I do not think a 5–10% relative valuation is inconceivable at peak. At a $40-$50bn PUMP MC, that would imply a very different range of outcomes for BATON. I am not using that as my base case but I am also not going to pretend the possibility does not exist simply because it cannot be neatly modeled. This is crypto and anyhting can happen. The best trades often sit at the intersection of fundamentals, reflexivity and culture and BATON gives me all three. So when I put this entire thesis together, this is what I see: 1. I am bullish on BATON because I am bullish on PUMP. 2. I am bullish on PUMP because I believe the market is materially undervaluing a protocol already generating enormous revenue while still having several monetization levers available to it. 3. And I believe BATON offers a highly convex way to express that view because its narrative, reward mechanism, community and memetic identity are all tied directly to the asset I believe is undervalued. Could the thesis be wrong? Of course. PUMP could fail to rerate. Revenues could decline. BATON could fail to maintain its position as the dominant reflection meme. The community could weaken etc but the asymmetry is precisely why I have the highest conviction in Baton. The downside is obvious to everyone but the upside, if the PUMP thesis plays out and BATON remains its dominant cultural and economic reflection, is the entire life-changing thesis And if you are reading this while $BATON is still below a $10m market cap, then at the very least, you are seeing the thesis before the market has had the opportunity to fully price it. That is the bet. Over the past few months, I was early in $Cashcat, $Ansem and $PONS and this is my final major high-conviction bet of the cycle. This is it guys. We check back in months 🤞