Memecoins look to be getting a second life

Pump.fun brought in $521,150 in revenue on April 24, its second-highest day of revenue ever.

What is pump.fun? The protocol allows for anyone to quickly deploy a memecoin by providing a name, ticker, and JPG image with a less than $2 fee. The user does not have to provide any seed liquidity.

The platform first launched on Solana but has expanded to some Ethereum Layer 2’s like Blast and Base. While anyone, in theory, can deploy tokens on any of these networks, there are typically some technical skills associated with doing so, whereas pump.fun makes the process very easy for anyone.

Pump.fun also attempts to prevent rug pulls since every token launched on the protocol does not have a pre-sale or an allocation for any team members. Instead tokens instantly become traded on a bonding curve, where users can buy and sell. After the tokens reach a certain market cap, a certain amount of liquidity is deposited onto a native DEX and burned. In the case of Solana, once a token reaches a $69,000 market cap, $12,000 of liquidity is deposited into Raydium.

The whole concept of pump.fun plays into the era of memecoins that we seem to be living in. The platform reached over $5 million in revenue in under two months. Its daily revenues peaked back in early April, when memecoins were still at their peak of popularity, but revenues slowed throughout the month.

Memecoins did seem to also see a drop off in popularity through April. The GMCI MEME index reached a high of 385 at the end of March but fell down to 237 in mid-April, indicating that memecoins were dropping in value. To be fair, the index still remained well above levels seen earlier in the year, with the index starting in 2024 below 100. So memecoins were still holding onto a lot of their gains, but their growth had stalled.

Pump.fun also continued to make $120,000 a day during the slowdown, so things were not all that bad. But things may be turning around in the memecoins space again. For one, more revenue for pump.fun indicates more people launching memecoins on the platform. And the GMCI MEME index climbed back above 300 again last week, showing a slight rebound.

So while earlier in the month it seemed like the memecoin sector’s flourish was diminishing, it looks to be getting a second life this past week.

This is an excerpt from The Block's Data & Insights newsletter . Dig into the numbers making up the industry’s most thought-provoking trends.

　　Disclaimer: Includes third-party opinions. No financial advice. See Risk Warning.