🥛 PRO | Can PumpFun be dethroned? 👑

GM. This is Milk Road Crypto PRO, the ‘X-ray machine’ of crypto newsletters – we help you see through the hype and learn what’s really going on.

PumpFun, one of the hottest crypto launchpads on the market right now, just pulled off a massive public sale for its token, $PUMP. 

They put 15% of the total supply (that’s 150 billion tokens out of a 1 trillion supply) up for grabs at $0.004 each. Same price private investors paid. 👏

That means they were aiming to raise an additional $600 million from the public.

So, how long did it take them to hit that goal? 

Just 12 minutes. Seriously. One of the fastest and most successful token launches the space has probably ever seen.

But honestly, it wasn’t all that surprising. Here’s why:

PumpFun launched in January 2024 and has been setting records ever since. 

It became one of the fastest crypto apps to reach $100M in revenue, achieving it in just 217 days. It also set the record for fastest to reach $500M, hitting that milestone in only 374 days.

Next goal? Reaching $1 billion in revenue.

Looking back at the numbers, they've been bringing in an average of about $1.42 million every single day. At that pace, hitting $1 billion would take just another 150 days. 

Just to give you an idea of how impressive this is, Coinbase took 8 and a half years to reach $1 billion in total revenue. PumpFun is on track to reach that same huge milestone in under 2 years!

But we don't just follow the hype blindly. We know there's a bigger story here, and we're ready to dig deeper.

Let’s take the step most public sale buyers skipped — looking past the hype and into the fundamentals.

Because they’re starting to lose market share in terms of newly created tokens, fast! 👀

Back in April, PumpFun had almost zero competition — they completely owned the space on Solana. 

Even after others joined the game, they still held around 85% of the market, which is no small feat. But lately, that grip has started to loosen.

👉 Their market share has dropped to just 21%, with LetsBonkFun stepping in and taking the lead.

So yeah, their oversubscribed fundraising, record-breaking revenue, and the fact that they basically created this whole new market is impressive. 

But the job isn’t done. Not even close.

Now that they have everything, they plan to take a real shot at challenging the biggest apps in the world — competing with platforms like YouTube, Twitch, or X.

But it’s still unclear how this whole market will evolve, or if PumpFun can truly challenge all these giants.

Putting all the data together and sharing our thoughts should help us understand if $PUMP is worth adding to our portfolio at today’s prices.

Here’s what we're looking at:

• Were investors jumping into the public sale looking at real numbers or just chasing old hype?

• What’s actually fueling LetsBonk’s recent surge?

• Can Pump make a comeback and lead the pack again?

• What needs to happen for its revenue to hit millions once more?

• And what’s a fair value for $PUMP today?

At the very least, these are the questions we're asking ourselves. 

And when one of the most successful crypto apps finally launches a token, you can bet we're digging in and doing our homework to understand it fully.

Today, we’re making a small tweak to our usual MR PRO playbook.

Instead of starting with the team, we’re kicking things off by looking at the product first.

PRODUCT

Let’s start with the problem PumpFun set out to solve.

People love to speculate in crypto. That’s a fact. We’re not looking at you. 😄

👉 But before PumpFun, it wasn’t that easy for creators to launch tokens and it definitely wasn’t safe for speculators who wanted to trade these tokens without worrying about scams or rug pulls.

That’s where PumpFun changed the game.

It makes launching a token dead simple — anyone can do it in under a minute using a clean, beginner-friendly interface. And it costs nothing.

On top of that, everything is built to be fair, transparent, and secure. No honeypots. No shady tokenomics. 

Every token follows a predictable structure, and once it hits a certain level of market cap, PumpFun automatically adds deep liquidity, so people can buy or sell anytime without needing a market maker.

✍️ So what they’ve really done is unlock a whole new market for speculation — one that smoothly connects creators and speculators by giving each side exactly what they need.

That’s PumpFun in a nutshell — but now we want to dig a little deeper and take a closer look at their two main products: what they do, how they work, and why they matter.

PumpFun

This is the well-known token launchpad that lets anyone create a new token in just a few clicks.

All you have to do is connect your wallet, enter a coin name, ticker, optional description, and upload an image or video. That’s it.

There used to be a small $2 fee, but right now, it’s completely free. 

So how does PumpFun make money from this?

Until a token reaches a $69K market cap, it’s only tradable on PumpFun’s bonding curve and during that phase, they take a 1% cut from all trading volume.

That makes trading volume a key metric for PumpFun’s success. But if you really want to understand the engine behind it, watch the number of new tokens being launched. 

There’s a clear link between fresh token creations and the trading activity that follows on the bonding curve.

You can see that recently, only around 80,000 tokens are being created each week. That’s a pretty big drop compared to recent averages — not long ago, they were seeing around 200,000 new tokens per week.

However, the graduation rate has stayed pretty steady at about 0.9%. That means only 1 out of every 100 tokens actually reaches the $69K market cap needed to “graduate”.

To prove our point and highlight the strong connection between tokens created and trading volume — take a look at the chart below.

Trading volumes on the bonding curve have also taken a sharp hit — dropping to around $350 million, down from recent averages of about $1 billion.

We’ll dig deeper into what’s driving this slowdown in a moment. But first, let’s talk about PumpSwap and how it fits into the bigger picture.

PumpSwap

Previously, when a token hit the $69K market cap, it would "graduate" and move its liquidity over to Raydium — a decentralized exchange on Solana.

But starting March 20, 2025, that changed. 

👉 Now, tokens that graduate migrate their liquidity to PumpFun’s own exchange: PumpSwap.

This move wasn’t surprising. It was the next logical step for PumpFun.

Instead of handing off users and liquidity to another exchange, they expanded vertically by launching their own platform, making sure they kept more of the traffic, volume, and value within their own ecosystem.

Now, they also earn from trading on this new market. PumpSwap charges a 0.3% fee on every trade, giving PumpFun another solid revenue stream.

Here’s a look at their AMM trading volumes.

PumpSwap is already pulling in way more volume than their bonding curve on PumpFun. It’s now averaging around $1.5 billion — roughly 4 times higher.

And even though the fee on PumpSwap is lower at 0.3% (compared to 1% on PumpFun), the much higher volume would suggest the protocol is likely pulling in similar revenue from both.

But that’s not quite correct, because the 0.3% trading fee on PumpSwap gets split between multiple parties:

• 0.20% goes to liquidity providers

• 0.05% goes to the protocol (Pump) 

• 0.05% goes to the token creators

So while the volume is higher, the actual cut going to PumpFun is much smaller than it might seem at first glance. It is 0.05% on PumpSwap versus 1% on PumpFun!

👉 That means PumpFun — the launchpad and bonding curve — still makes up about 85% of their total revenue, despite PumpSwap handling much higher trading volume.

Now that we’ve got a clear picture of their products and how they make money, let’s dive into their moat and figure out how defensible this business really is.

MOAT

A moat is what gives a project long-term staying power — something that’s tough to copy, and can be used to grow and protect market share over time.

We need to start with this chart. It shows the number of tokens created on Solana over time, broken down by different launchpads.

In the chart, PumpFun is represented by the green color.

PumpFun’s market share has slipped to just 21%, while the new rising star, LetsBonkFun (shown in orange) has taken the lead with a commanding 66%.

And as more tokens get created on other platforms, the trading bots and snipers follow the action — shifting their activity too.

You can see it clearly in the chart below, which shows weekly trading volume driven by these trading tools across different launchpads. 

The recent move from PumpFun to LetsBonkFun is obvious, as traders chase more opportunities where the activity is highest.

We think we might know what's fueling LetsBonkFun's sudden rise, but we’ll circle back to that at the end.

This shift raises an important question: does PumpFun still have a real edge? 

Let’s take a closer look at a few areas where they might still hold an edge.

First-mover advantage

It doesn’t seem like a strong moat anymore, especially with how fast others have caught up.

But PumpFun didn’t just join this space — they created it. Two years ago, this type of market didn’t even exist. PumpFun kicked off the entire category and set the standard others are now following.

They’ve also been pushing the envelope from the start, testing out things like video streaming and other interactive features. That kind of early experimentation gave them a front-row seat to how this market works and insights newer players just don’t have yet.

So while the gap is closing, that early lead and proven execution could still give them an edge.

Sound familiar? It should. We’ve seen this play out before.

Take Uniswap, for example. When they first launched their DEX, it quickly gained traction. That success drew plenty of copycats trying to pull off a “vampire attack” — cloning the code and offering better incentives to steal users and liquidity.

But fast forward to today? Most of those copy-paste projects are gone or irrelevant. Meanwhile, Uniswap is still standing strong as the market leader, continuing to innovate and improve with each version.

The lesson? 

👉 Imitation might win short-term attention, but long-term success comes from execution and staying ahead.

Liquidity

Liquidity on the bonding curve is usually short-lived. Token creators have just a small window to generate hype and drive their token’s price up before interest fades. The average graduation time is 6 days.

But the real moat lies in the tokens that successfully graduate and move to PumpSwap. Once they do, they carry over their liquidity, and in many cases, that pool will remain the deepest in the market.

That gives PumpFun a lasting advantage. 

👉 As long as these tokens keep trading on PumpSwap, they continue generating fees — benefiting the platform, liquidity providers, and even token creators.

Capital

It’s not usually seen as a moat, but we think it gives them a real edge over the competition.

PumpFun recently raised a massive $600 million from the public sale. 

And just before the public sale, they also raised a massive $720M through a private round. Yep, you heard that right — they sold 18% of their tokens to private investors.

That brings their total raise to around $1.32B — an absolutely huge war chest to build, expand, and compete.

It places them among the most well-funded apps in all of crypto. It's rare to see a crypto project sitting on that much in stablecoins.

This kind of war chest gives them serious firepower. Whether it’s hiring top talent, expanding into new verticals, or doubling down on product innovation.

It’s a big advantage that most competitors simply don’t and won't have. 

The moats we've listed are solid, but are they strong enough to push PumpFun to much higher valuations in the long run?

Let’s save our take on the key opportunities and risks for later. First, let’s look at how big this market really is.