Y22

I wanted to write a post this morning offering some honest thoughts on the whole "Pump fun is the enemy" discourse I've been seeing across the timeline. As someone who has been here full-time since late 2020, this isn't my first rodeo when it comes to watching CT collectively turn against the very infrastructure that defined a previous market cycle. In fact, I'd argue this is an almost predictable phenomenon that occurs at every major paradigm shift in crypto, particularly when we transition away from a dominant speculative asset class and towards whatever comes next. The platform that facilitated the previous meta inevitably becomes the focal point of frustration when the economics underpinning that meta begin to deteriorate. Most of you probably haven't been around long enough to remember, but we witnessed an almost identical situation with OpenSea during the transition away from NFTs in 2022–23. At that point, there was virtually nothing OpenSea could have done to satiate its existing user base. The NFT boom that it had largely facilitated was over, liquidity was evaporating, and the core participants who had previously made substantial amounts of money trading NFTs were suddenly finding it increasingly difficult to generate returns. Predictably, people started to get pissed off. OpenSea was suddenly extractive. OpenSea wasn't innovating. OpenSea wasn't doing enough for its users. OpenSea was responsible for the deterioration of the very market it had helped popularise. And while there were certainly legitimate criticisms to be made regarding its business model the broader reality was that NFTs were simply no longer the dominant speculative asset class. With the benefit of hindsight, it's difficult to imagine any realistic set of decisions OpenSea could have made that would have fundamentally reversed that trajectory. The writing was already on the wall. Yet, to this day, you'll still encounter people who genuinely believe OpenSea somehow "killed NFTs". Which, to me, is an absurd interpretation of how speculative markets function. No emerging asset class gets to enjoy an indefinite period of extraordinary returns, particularly once the opportunities that initially made it attractive become widely understood, commoditised and increasingly competitive. And I believe we're now witnessing an almost identical phenomenon with pump fun. Call it the OpenSea-ification of the trenches. We're experiencing the gradual exhaustion of capital-M memecoins as the de facto speculative asset class of this cycle, and the platform most closely associated with their proliferation has become the natural target for everyone's frustration. The uncomfortable reality is that most people, outside of a relatively small subset of sophisticated participants, simply aren't making meaningful money trading memes anymore. There are numerous reasons for this, but without getting lost in the weeds, the underlying dynamics are relatively straightforward. Liquidity is considerably more fragmented, the number of competing tokens and narratives has expanded dramatically, and the capital required to sustain the valuations we witnessed during the height of the mania simply isn't circulating through the market in the same way. At the same time, the average participant is competing against an increasingly sophisticated group of traders who have spent years refining their strategies, infrastructure and understanding of the trenches. This is an important point that I don't think gets nearly enough attention. Every speculative asset class eventually becomes a more solved game. The inefficiencies that initially created extraordinary opportunities are gradually arbitraged away. As more participants figure out how to play the game, the edge that once existed begins to disappear, and making money becomes increasingly difficult for the average trader. Consequently, the risk/reward profile deteriorates for the average participant. What was once an environment where relatively unsophisticated traders could generate extraordinary returns becomes one where those same participants are effectively competing against professionals. This isn't a unique failure of memecoins. It's how financial markets function. It happened with NFTs, and it's happening with memes. Which brings me to what I consider the fundamental misconception underpinning much of the current anti-pump discourse. There's this persistent belief that if only pump fun had implemented different incentives, distributed fees differently, worked with different KOLs, or simply never existed in the first place, we'd somehow be living in a memecoin utopia where everyone continued making money indefinitely. I find that argument deeply unconvincing. For one, it assumes pump fun exists in a vacuum, rather than within an intensely competitive market where alternative platforms would inevitably emerge to service the same underlying demand. Remove pump fun from the equation, and you don't magically remove the economic incentives that gave rise to it. You simply create an opportunity for another platform to occupy the same position. More importantly, it assumes that the structural deterioration in memecoin profitability is primarily a consequence of platform-level decisions rather than the natural maturation and saturation of the asset class itself. I don't believe that's the case. And to be clear, none of this is intended as an unconditional defence of pump fun. There are absolutely decisions worth criticising. But IMO the distinction I think people are missing is that... A platform can make suboptimal decisions without being responsible for the structural decline of the market it operates within. Even if pump fun had executed perfectly, two fundamental realities would remain unchanged. First, crypto has largely failed to attract sufficient new capital and participants to sustain the increasingly large speculative ecosystems we've built across successive cycles. Second, memecoin trading has become an increasingly competitive activity, where the average participant is now competing against a much more sophisticated and experienced subset of the market. Neither of these problems disappears because pump fun changes its fee structure or starts working with different influencers. And neither would disappear if pump fun ceased to exist tomorrow. Simply put, people are looking for a platform-level solution to what is fundamentally a market-level problem. I think that's the real source of the disconnect. When an asset class stops generating the returns people have become accustomed to, it's psychologically much easier to identify a villain than to accept that the opportunity itself has fundamentally changed. OpenSea became that villain for NFTs. Pump fun is becoming that villain for memecoins. And I suspect that when the next dominant speculative asset class eventually emerges, we'll watch this exact same cycle play out again. None of this means platforms should be immune from criticism or that participants shouldn't demand better incentives, transparency and alignment. They absolutely should. But there's a meaningful difference between holding a company accountable for its decisions and attributing the inevitable maturation of an entire speculative market to that company's existence. Until we start distinguishing between those two things, I think we're going to keep having the wrong conversation. And sure, call me a pump fun shill if you want, but many of you made life-changing gains during peak memecoin mania precisely because pump democratised launches. It's worth acknowledging that, just as it's worth recognising that the decline in liquidity and profitability isn't solely the fault of the launchpad that helped facilitate the boom. Ultimately, I think it's worth asking whether any single platform could have fundamentally changed where we find ourselves today, or whether this was always the natural trajectory of the market. Food for thought.