If Pump.fun becomes the "fast hand in the cryptocurrency circle"

Pump.fun is the most special product in this cycle. Since its launch more than 4 months ago, more than 1.17 million tokens have been issued on Pump.fun, and the cumulative revenue has exceeded 50 million US dollars. How to understand this number? Compared with Uniswap, the top traffic product in the previous bull market, it is estimated that Uniswap Labs has an annual revenue of about 25 million to 30 million US dollars.

It can be said that Pump.fun is not a typical Web3 project. It does not have a complex token economics model or a DAO governance mechanism, but with precise market positioning, Pump.fun has created a business market that is sure to make money. Under the dominance of the attention economy, many people will interpret the continued prosperity of the meme coin track as the advantage of short videos over long videos. So in the era of "all-people coin issuance", can there be a share of the pie for latecomers? With the attention economy superimposed on the extreme pvp, what new tricks will the meme coin have?

The man who burned himself for promoting meme coins is still live

Remember the developer who burned himself for promoting his own meme coin a month ago? Last Thursday, June 27, he was still live on Twitter.

The developer's name is Mikol. On May 17, he launched a meme coin called TruthOrDare (DARE) on Pump.fun. At that time, Pump.fun did not have a live broadcast function, and could only post pictures in the comment area. Mikol showed the community the "highlights" of the first season in person. He poured isopropyl alcohol on his body live on twich and asked his friends to launch fireworks in his direction. Amid the exclamations of fans and the rise of DARE, his body was ignited and he was sent to the hospital with third-degree burns all over his body.

The token DARE gained 12 times on the day Mikol was burned, and quickly returned to zero the next day. Mikol's story was reported by the crypto community media Decrypt, which attracted a lot of attention. Faced with such popularity, Mikol, who was lying in the ICU, specially recorded a video to tell the community that he would not give up operations, "You will see a better me."

Mikol is not the only one who posts a meme coin and then uses extreme behavior to attract attention and expects it to rise. The Solana meme craze has brought in a large number of crypto newcomers and also spawned many meme coins that watch the line in seconds. In addition to Mikol's "burn coin", there are also meme coins named "LIVEWITHMOM" and live broadcasts of exposing private parts of the body to "ask for buying".

Although the life cycle of these meme coins is extremely short and there are very few with a market value of over $1 million, the combination of live broadcast and coin issuance has allowed many people with low incomes to find the code to wealth.

A week after this incident, Pump.fun launched the live broadcast function, and the community’s first reaction was to advise the coin issuer “please don’t burn yourself to make money.”

Just when Mikol’s deeds attracted the attention of the community, there were many opinions that such behavior was too morbid and contrary to the original intention of the encryption spirit, and some people advised Mikol to find a good job after he recovered. But after his condition stabilized, Mikol, who was still in the hospital, started a twich live broadcast and broadcast it simultaneously on Pump.fun. As he wished, his comeback to live broadcast pushed DARE up 15 times again.

The comeback rally only lasted for one day, and the price of DARE continued to fall, and it seemed difficult to have the momentum to rise again. But since then, Mikol often broadcasts live with a bandage, performing eating raw eggs, swallowing cinnamon powder, and synchronizing his daily recovery. There are also new members joining his "TruthOrDare family" to show "unique skills" such as eating mustard and eating dry peppers.

Except in very rare cases, Mikol and his DARE may find it difficult to get the same attention as before. There are more Mikols on the Internet, hoping to gain the attention of the community through sufficiently abstract and impactful performances, so that their memes can soar.

Those who have high traffic have already started to issue coins, from Jenner to Mother, Father, etc. The wave of celebrity coins has made the issuing teams and early followers rich. Although people like Vitalik have expressed their opinions against this phenomenon, it is difficult to stop the trend of "entertainment to death" in the crypto community.

It may be considered that the newcomers in this round of crypto community come from the "sinking market". The market for meme coins is still huge, but unlike the meme coins such as DOGE and PEPE that have some connection with the crypto community, the current meme coin craze points to a new direction, the sinking market outside the crypto community.

The crypto market is undergoing a transition from PGC to UGA

There are many practical reasons for the emergence of the meme craze. It is true that the crypto narrative in this bull market is not as attractive as before. Compared with the "value coin" with opaque chip distribution and grand narrative, newcomers are more willing to use meme as the first stop to experience the circle.

Behind this, more and more users have seen through the ultimate PVP logic. No matter how changeable the narrative is, it is just to create a plate that is big enough for the next person to take over. The market is not short of people who issue coins, but people who can tell the story of issuing coins well. Since the consensus of the community has become "the essence of value coins is also a kind of air coin", it is better to issue coins in one step. The birth of Pump.fun is just in time.

The emergence of Pump.fun allows users to publish their own meme coins with one click at a very low cost (0.02 SOL). Rounds of memes take off and crash in a few hours. More than 10,000 tokens are released on Pump.fun every day, accounting for more than 80% of the total Solana ecosystem tokens. Recently, Pump.fun's daily revenue is between 450,000 and 1 million US dollars, and its total revenue has exceeded 50 million US dollars in the past few months since its launch.

As Youbi Capital pointed out in an analysis report released in May, the popularity of low-liquidity assets is an inherent reaction to the lack of liquidity in the market in the current cycle. There is also a potential metaphor that the sharp increase in the number of coins issued after the transition from PGA (Professional Generated Asset) to UGA (User Generated Asset) has led to a more decentralized consensus.

However, new opportunities still exist.

Three days ago, DEX Screener launched the token issuance platform Moonshot. More than 7,000 tokens were issued on the first day of its launch. During the same period, Solana was also recognized by the community for launching blinks, a function that can trade tokens on Twitter. Combining these two hot topics, the meme coin SC has risen more than 100 times in two days, indicating that the market wants to grab the cake of the coin issuance platform, and users are also looking forward to the new story after Pump.fun.

After all, crypto technology has unprecedentedly and greatly lowered the speed and threshold of asset issuance and trading, and its potential application market is still very large. As long as the community's demand for "attention monetization" remains, the crypto market still has a narrative to tell.

What if live streaming happens on Web3?

In the traditional Internet, the "attention economy" industry has been developing for about 20 years, and has experienced a transition from the forum post bar era to the picture and text Weibo era, and then to the short video live broadcast era. And this trajectory is also playing out in the crypto field.

On May 29, pump.fun announced the launch of the live broadcast function on the platform. For a website that makes money by charging dogs, users do not really have the need to watch live broadcasts. However, live streaming, as the form of communication with the largest information carrying capacity, the most scene-based and infectious feeling, superimposed with the asset coin issuance function, is an application scenario worth imagining from the perspective of attention economy.

Simplify commercialization to the extreme

The commercialization path of Web3 is completely different from that of the traditional Internet, but in the attention economy, the typical cases of Web2 can give some inspiration to the crypto industry.

Take Kuaishou as an example. In 2013, Kuaishou, which was less than two years old, decided to transform from a GIF production tool to an Internet community. Users produce content on Kuaishou themselves, record and share their lives and creativity through short videos, and interact with fans. Unlike new platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou's user positioning is "average people in society", and its users are mainly young people distributed in second- and third-tier cities.

In 2014, YY anchors with a group of loyal fans in the sinking market settled in Kuaishou. At that time, Kuaishou's monthly active users were 1 million. At the end of 2016, Kuaishou's monthly active users exceeded 64 million. In the two years when Kuaishou was growing rapidly, YY anchors occupied the top four places in the list of Kuaishou's top anchors.

Kuaishou maintained the characteristics of the sinking market community. It did not sign Internet celebrities, did not support traffic, and the mechanism of fair algorithms encouraged the vigorous development of UGC content. Compared with the products of the same period, Kuaishou finally stood out with its unique "decentralized community" model.

In 2017, Kuaishou took the lead in seizing the dividends of live broadcasting and became the world's largest single live broadcasting platform. According to Kuaishou's prospectus, from 2017 to 2019, the company's revenue was 8.3 billion, 20.3 billion, and 39.1 billion yuan, respectively, of which the live broadcasting revenue was 7.9 billion, 18.6 billion, 31.4 billion, and 17.3 billion yuan, respectively, accounting for 95.18%, 91.63%, 80.31%, and 68.38%, respectively. It can be seen that live broadcasting was Kuaishou's core business at the time and also the background of Kuaishou.

After booming, Kuaishou had to adjust its content ecology. After all, traditional Web2 companies need to transform themselves into commercial companies. In this process, only those content producers with high audience consumption levels, who meet traditional social values and survive in fierce competition can stay until the end.

Looking back, it is better to say that Kuaishou has targeted the novice market of the attention economy track rather than the sinking market. The coin issuance platform, which is also aimed at crypto novices, does not need to consider "commercial transformation".

In traditional Internet giants, whether it is a content platform or a shopping platform, they all hope to show users "there are good things worth watching/buying here", because only content that is recognized and loved by more users has commercial value and then brings profits to the platform. But Pump.fun does not need commercialization. Its profit model is extremely simple and pure. It only needs to show "there are enough coins and traders here". As long as there are people trading, Pump.fun can make money.

At present, although Pump.fun has opened the comment area and live broadcast function, users log in to Pump.fun only to complete the buying or selling process. The discussion of meme coins mainly occurs on Twitter, and meme coin developers who want to live broadcast will also choose platforms such as Twitch and Kick for live broadcast promotion.

In the Pump.fun interface, users can only choose by the number of comments and the market value of the token. If there is a live broadcast column, will Pump.fun have a "live broadcast god disk"?

Humanity Game and Regulatory Difficulties

At present, some meme display platforms have emerged, such as Game.com, whose Twitter followers have just exceeded 7,000, providing paid list token services. By paying 0.8 SOL, you can publish your own meme coins on this platform to gain more attention.

The Pump.fun team does not seem to have any intention of making more explorations on existing services. After all, a small team with an income of more than 40 million US dollars in half a year and a stable daily income of 600,000 US dollars does not have the motivation to break the product and innovate the narrative. It is enough to position it as a "tool".

As more newcomers enter the encryption field, perhaps live broadcasting can become a label for other coin issuance platforms such as Moonshot to differentiate their play.

But the past collapse of several x to earn projects in Web3 has shown that no matter how sophisticated the design is, it cannot challenge human nature. On June 13, a user launched a meme coin with a sheep wearing a hat on Pump.fun and broadcast it live at the same time. But just a moment after the live broadcast started, the comments section was still discussing the sheep's actions, and the snipers who bought the token at the time of the token release quickly sold most of the tokens at a high price, causing the token price to plummet.

After the token collapsed, the meme coin issuer explained in the comment section, "My token balance remains unchanged and can be verified by solscan. If I just want to make a quick buck, why would I broadcast my sheep live but not sell my tokens?"

Not selling may be because the token has not yet been listed on Raydium, and until the end, the token did not reach a market value of $60,000. And the issuer never broadcast his sheep live again.

In addition, regulatory issues are also something that such platforms need to pay attention to. If the live broadcast format is combined with asset issuance, there will inevitably be various extreme and vulgar behaviors to attract attention. When Pump.fun announced the launch of the live broadcast function, the community was most concerned about how the platform would review extreme content. When the issuer posted some pornographic or more extreme inappropriate behavior, should Pump.fun intervene to prevent possible criminal behavior?

Conclusion

Back to the meme coin issuers at the beginning of this article, we can feel the content ecology of the traditional Internet short video platform in the early years. After several years of development, these platforms have explored a business model with great money-making ability.

As a content form that provides an "immersive experience", live broadcasting makes people realize how simple the speed of "traffic" can be in a form that breaks imagination, and traffic monetization channels such as rewards and bringing goods also allow content producers to have the ability to compete with platform capital to a certain extent.

When it comes to the crypto space, the platform’s control power disappears in an instant. However, attention is still the core driving force of the entire market. What kind of story will happen if live streaming happens in Web3? Can the ultimate use of traffic find new forms of expression in a decentralized environment?

Looking back over the years, in the constant breakdown and reconstruction of consensus, the crypto industry has seen countless projects that have gone from "innovation" to collapse. The emergence of Pump.fun is just the beginning.

欢迎加入律动 BlockBeats 官方社群：

Telegram 订阅群： https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram 交流群： https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Twitter 官方账号： https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia