Pump.fun launches down more than 80% from peak

Successful new token listings on memecoin platform Pump.fun are down more than 80% from January highs, according to data from Dune Analytics. 

The daily number of tokens completing Pump.fun’s “bonding curve,” a prerequisite to listing on a decentralized exchange (DEX), is down to about 200 on Feb. 26 from as high as nearly 1,200 on Jan. 23 and 24, according to data from Dune Analytics. 

Bonding involves bootstrapping trading liquidity in Solana (SOL) tokens directly on Pump.fun before a memecoin migrates to Raydium, Solana’s most popular DEX. 

Overall Pump.fun token launches — irrespective of whether they finish bonding — followed a similar trajectory, dropping from highs of more than 70,000 on Jan. 23 to approximately 25,000 on Feb. 26, Dune data showed. 

Related: Solana shorts spike amid memecoin scandals

Dampened sentiment

Activity on Pump.fun and on the Solana network declined in February after a series of memecoin-related scandals soured sentiment among retail traders. 

Solana saw explosive growth in 2024 largely because of memecoin trading, with the chain’s total value locked (TVL) increasing from around $1.4 billion to more than $9 billion that year, according to DefiLlama.

In the fourth quarter of 2024, application revenues on Solana increased by 213%, primarily due to memecoin speculation, according to a report by crypto research firm Messari. 

However, in 2025, insider selling and huge losses for retail began to sour sentiment on Solana’s memecoin ecosystem.

On Feb. 14, Libra (LIBRA), a memecoin seemingly endorsed by Argentine President Javier Milei, erased some $4.4 billion in market capitalization within hours of launching. 

Pump.fun co-founder Alon said in a Feb. 17 X post he was “disgusted” by the events surrounding Libra, adding he designed Pump.fun as a way to “democratize coin creation to build in a baseline level of safety, simplicity, and fairness for every launch.”

Since January, traders have lost approximately $2 billion across 800,000 wallets on Official Trump (TRUMP), US President Donald Trump’s official memecoin. 

The TRUMP launch was “the clearest possible example of the insider game reaching its apex,” Westie, a Blockworks research analyst, said in a Feb. 16 article on X.

Even Pump.fun itself fell victim to a memecoin scam. On Feb. 26, the Pump.fun X account was compromised to promote a fake governance token called “PUMP” and other fraudulent coins.

Magazine: Trump’s crypto ventures raise conflict of interest, insider trading questions

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