The Next Chapter for Pump.Fun | Co-Founder Alon
Episode publishedPodcast: BanklessBankless
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Alan, I think some listeners, maybe maybe most listeners will see the title of this episode when they when they clicked on it, and they'll say, like, oh, wow. Pump fun on Bankless. That is a weird combo. Why Bankless? Of all the podcasts that are out there, there are more like Solana, interested podcasts. There's, you know, plenty there's plenty of options. Why Bankless? Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of Internet money and Internet finance. Today on the show, I'm hosting a a conversation with Alon, a cofounder of PumpFund, the meme coin launchpad on Solana. The idea of Pump
Thanks for having me, David. Really excited to chat about pump fun, meme coins, anything that we wanna discuss, especially addressing your audience as as a major privilege. So, you know, thanks again.
I think, like I said, people understand pumped dot fun. And, also, by the way, pumped dot fun or pumped fun?
Yeah. I've been struggling with that myself. I I I love pumped dot fun at first, but I think the users like saying pumped fun. So you gotta go with with what's organic with what people are saying out there. So I say pumped fun these days.
Okay. Pump fun. Maybe you can just give a a little bit of color to your genesis, your background pre pumped fun, and then just do you start start the, conversation off with, like, the idea inception of pump fun in the first place?
Yeah. Absolutely. So as for myself and and, you know, my two cofounders as well, we've been in the space for a while. We I think all of us have gone to the space by being retail traders, getting into the space, get you know, buying Bitcoin and and ETH and and DOGE and and stuff like that. I think, you know, we got more and more into it over the years. Ultimately, we worked in a few different projects. Myself, personally, I was quite deeply involved with a project called, NFT Perp, which is a features exchange for NFTs and an arbitrum back in the day. So we're quite involved on the, you know, o
This is actually triggering a memory for me about the pre pump era. Maybe maybe this is most the exemplar example of this is the slurf incident where we had this one Solana developer who, like, publicized, like, I'm doing a presale for my meme coin that I'm going to launch. There's no pumped up fund platform to do that, and so this you would just send your money to this trusted individual who would manage it and then launch a meme coin, add the soul to a to an LP position, and and then that's how the meme coin would launch. And then Slurf, this one incident, he accidentally burned the LP token
I think when we first built Adi and before it was even shipped, we were you know, as I mentioned, I think we were extremely bullish on the idea because we're familiar like, unlike all the other products that we built, we actually, you know, we actually lived and breathed this this ecosystem. We I think we understood the significance of lowering the barrier to entry a a thousand x. Like, you used to need, you know, a few thousand dollars in liquidity to make a coin even worthwhile. Like, you could obviously seed an LP with $50 but no one's gonna fucking you know, no one's gonna buy that. Right?
I wanna zoom forward to this current day because I I think the arc of Pumped Up Fund is still pretty fresh in in people's memory. So coming to where we are today in in March 2025, the meme coin sector has created just an immense amount of pain for the crypto industry as a whole. Like, broadly, everywhere, like, meme coins are in, like, the common vernacular kind of in the in the same way that, like, monkey JPEGs were in
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