Author: Frank, PANews

Pump.fun, serving as the "meme minting factory" within the Solana ecosystem, has accumulated astonishing revenue and wealth. However, the price of its platform token, PUMP, has struggled under persistent selling pressure. To reverse this trend, Pump.fun is attempting a two-pronged approach: aggressive token buybacks and the experimental introduction of a new AI agent feature called "Mayhem Mode."

Faced with a complex market environment and internal challenges, can this Meme carrier really make a comeback?

The data showed a significant decline, but remained relatively strong compared to the industry average.

To understand the dilemma of Pump.fun, one must look at its complex data.

As of November 14, Pump.fun's average daily revenue remained above $1 million, ranking among the top five of all protocols. However, this figure represents a significant decline compared to the $4 million daily revenue it generated at the beginning of the year.

Meanwhile, the number of new tokens issued daily on Pump.fun has decreased from a peak of 70,000 to less than 20,000. The number of daily active wallets has also declined, although it has remained above 100,000 for the past three months, so the decline is not severe. The token graduation rate is currently significantly lower; since February of this year, the graduation rate of tokens on Pump.fun has consistently been below 1%, even dropping to 0.58% in September. This indirectly reflects the decreasing success rate of meme market speculation.

However, a large part of this decline is due to the overall industry downturn; compared to its peers, Pump.fun's market share has actually increased. For example, on November 12th, Pump.fun issued 14,800 tokens on Solana's meme launch platform, accounting for approximately 93.4%. Previously, during the meme launch platform wars, its share had dropped as low as 16.8%.

Looking at the overall data performance, Pump.fun's data performance has indeed declined significantly compared to its peak period, but it appears to be more resilient compared to its peers.

"Buybacks" and "Pullbacks": Ineffective Token Business Strategies

Faced with slowing platform growth and a continued decline in the price of the PUMP token, the Pump.fun team is attempting to revitalize the market through "cash power" buybacks and the launch of "Mayhem Mode".

Since launching its token PUMP in July, Pump.fun has used approximately 98% of its platform revenue to buy back over $173.7 million worth of PUMP tokens, representing 11.19% of the total circulating supply.

This repurchase effort ranks second among all repurchase agreements, with daily repurchase volume second only to Hyperliquid.

However, PUMP's price performance and the extent of the buybacks seem disproportionate. The token has fallen from its September high, dropping as low as $0.0015, a maximum decline of over 83%. The current pullback is approximately 60%, while Bitcoin's maximum pullback during the same period was approximately 23%, and HYPE's was approximately 40%.

With the "power of money" failing, the team attempted to create a new narrative through product innovation. On November 12th, the platform launched an experimental "Chaos Mode." This feature aims to automatically participate in the trading of new tokens by introducing AI agents. According to the documentation, these AI agents will mint an additional 1 billion tokens for selected tokens (doubling the total supply to 2 billion), then conduct "random trading" within 24 hours to increase early liquidity, and finally burn any unsold portions.

However, this highly anticipated update encountered "chaos" as soon as it went live. Community feedback indicated that the new features were not user-friendly and instead contained numerous bugs, including "minting excessive token supply," "depleting creator funds," and "locking user funds."

Pepe Boost, a KOL in the meme field, bluntly stated: "In actual observation, there is no more trading volume than ordinary tokens." He added, "I thought there would be a big one, but it turns out that it's just some experimental AI playing around on Pump."

The market is dumping shares in the "Meme" sector, not Pump.fun.

Why can't daily buybacks of millions of dollars support the price? Highly anticipated new features have become a laughing stock. The fundamental reason for the market's lack of response may not lie with Pump.fun alone, but rather with a broader narrative, structural flaws, and the power of cycles.

First, it's an inevitable trend, and no one can escape it.

Recently, the market correction has intensified, with almost all tokens experiencing declines. In this environment, buybacks can only "slow down the decline" rather than "reverse the trend." As mentioned earlier, Hyperliquid has a similarly robust revenue and buyback mechanism, but its token also experienced a significant 40% correction. This demonstrates that in a bear market, relying solely on protocol revenue for buybacks is insufficient to counteract macroeconomic selling pressure.

Secondly, there has always been a skepticism in the market that Pump.fun's high revenue and high trading volume are due to a huge "bubble," meaning they are generated by high-frequency trading bots rather than by real users.

Once this bubble bursts, the corresponding price will be difficult to sustain. PANews conducted a specific survey, randomly selecting several hundred recent transactions from 10 tokens that had not yet graduated for behavioral analysis. They found that bot trading volume currently accounts for approximately 54.7% of these tokens' trading volume, with each bot contributing an average of 22 transactions per token, compared to only 1.8 transactions from real users. In terms of transaction value contribution, each bot contributed $68 per transaction, with bots contributing approximately 45.6% of the total transaction value. However, this percentage is actually lower than previous surveys. Therefore, from this perspective, the "bot bubble" is a long-standing structural problem for Pump.fun, but it hasn't worsened recently and shouldn't be the main factor driving the token's decline.

Third, after excluding macroeconomic and robotic factors, the core reason may not be that Pump.fun is failing, but rather that the meme market itself is failing.

The fundamental reason for the market's lack of response is that investors have lost confidence in the "Meme Coin" sector as a whole. Pump.fun, as the infrastructure of this sector, reflects future expectations for the entire sector in terms of its token price. Currently, those expectations are pessimistic.

This is evident in the performance of the Solana ecosystem, where overall activity is declining. Data shows that the number of active wallets on the Solana chain recently hit a 12-month low. As the main battleground for Meme coins, Solana's "fuel" is running out.

It's not just Pump.fun; the data from other meme launch platforms is even more dismal. LetsBonk.fun, which once threatened Pump.fun's position in July, saw its activity rapidly collapse after August, and currently only around 200 new tokens are issued daily. In this industry-wide downturn, Pump.fun is actually the most resilient one.

Therefore, we can seemingly conclude that the decline in PUMP tokens is not due to the market selling off Pump.fun, but rather the Meme sector.

Pump.fun is simply the most luxurious first-class cabin on the sinking Titanic.

Since the launch of its buyback program, Pump.fun has repurchased 13.8% of the circulating supply of PUMP tokens.

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