The Madcap Rise of Memecoin Factory Pump. Entertainment

In one of the strange frontiers of the internet, a a unicorn with human breastsa cheetah smoking a cigaretteand an animated Elon Musk in traditional cloak sits cheek to jaw – the cast of a bad trip. Word Art banner at top of page floating anachronism. Icons glow, flicker, bounce, and otherwise evade the pursuing eye. Barely legible messages appear in green, red, and yellow, then disappear.

Yet beneath this belch of Internet oddities and low-key web design lies one of the fastest growing cryptocurrency businesses ever: Pump. Entertainmentlaunch platform memecoinsa type of crypto coin whose value rises and falls according to the popularity of the memes it references.

The platform went live in January 2024. In the 12 months since then, it has been reported by third parties that it introduced more than $350 million in revenue through a 1% discount on transactions.

Pump.Fun is the brainchild of three entrepreneurs in their early twenties: Noah Tweedale, Alon Cohen, and Dylan Kerler. The trio started out as memecoin traders, but grew tired of repeatedly falling victim to carpet-pulling, a type of scam where a coin issuer steals funds, leaving investors sitting on worthless tokens.

“Buying memecoins was a very unsafe thing to do… It was all designed to suck money out of people,” Tweedale said in an interview with WIRED late last year. “The idea with Pump was to build something where everyone was on the same page.”

The three co-founders of Pump.Fun, who met in England, have tried to keep their identities secret – Tweedale and Cohen continue to appear publicly under their respective online aliases, Sapijiju and A1on, while Kerler has few public ties to Pump.Fun . But their names surfaced last year in corporate documents related to the operation.

Tweedale agreed to meet with WIRED, but only on the condition that the location and details of his appearance remain undisclosed. When we met, he seemed serious but somewhat tense – and he was talking a mile a minute. He declined to answer questions about where the Pump.Fun operation is located or how many people work there.

The secrecy is partly a reflection of the cryptosphere’s common attitude that the right to privacy is sacrosanct, Tweedale argued. But it’s also about “personal security and safety,” he says. In theory, the amount of cryptocurrency flowing through Pump.Fun wallets could make the team a target would-be blackmailers.

The intention is for the founders to become more public in the future, Tweedale said. But in the meantime, the question remains how best to reinvest the money Pump.Fun has made to harden and expand the platform in the face of increased scrutiny and inevitable growth issues. “We’re not here to make a quick buck, shut down the website and run away. We want to build something that lasts,” says Tweedale.

The long-term vision, he claims, is to transform Pump.Fun from a one-dimensional memecoin startup to a competitor to the biggest social platforms, but where the lion’s share of revenue goes to users and creators. “Imagine Instagram or TikTok, where everything is investable,” says Tweedale. “The Pump user interface – everything we have so far – is the earliest possible version of what you can imagine we want to do.”

Before Pump.Fun, relatively few memecoins have come to market; only Dogecointhe original memecoin and a handful of others like it shiba inu, Pepeand Bank— achieved some notoriety. The complexity of developing memecoin and the cost of providing the necessary liquidity to make it easily tradable limited the amount that was released.