In one of the weirder periphery of the Internet, a unicorn with human breastsAND cheetah smokes a cigaretteand animated Elon Musk in a conventional cloak sits side by side – a figure of a bad trip. Word Art banner at the top of the page, floating anachronism. Icons sparkle, twinkle, reflect and otherwise avoid the chasing eye. Barely legible messages appear in green, red and yellow, then disappear.
However, beneath this belch of Internet weirdness and low-quality web design lies one of them fastest growing cryptocurrency companies ever: Pump.Fun, a platform for launching memecoins, a type of cryptocurrency whose value rises and falls with the popularity of the memes it refers to.
The platform was launched in January 2024. In the 12 months since then, third parties have reported that they have implemented over $350 million in revenue through a 1% reduction in turnover.
Pump.Fun is the brainchild of three twenty-something entrepreneurs: Noah Tweedale, Alan Cohen and Dylan Kerler. The trio started out as memecoin traders but grew tired of repeatedly falling victim to “rug-pulling,” a type of fraud in which a coin issuer steals funds, leaving investors sitting on worthless tokens.
“Buying memecoin was a very dangerous thing… It was all about sucking money out of people,” Tweedale told WIRED in an interview overdue last year. “The idea for Pump was to build something where everyone was on the same playing field.”
The three Pump.Fun co-founders, who met in England, have tried to keep their identities a secret – Tweedale and Cohen continue to publicly appear under their online pseudonyms, Sapijiju and A1on, while Kerler has little public connection to Pump. Fun. But their names was released last year in corporate documents related to the operation.
Tweedale agreed to meet with WIRED, but only on the condition that his whereabouts and details of his appearance remain undisclosed. When we met, he seemed grave but a little nervous – and he talked a mile a minute. He refused to answer questions about the location of Pump.Fun’s headquarters and the number of people it employs.
This secrecy is partly a reflection of the common attitude in the cryptosphere that the right to privacy is sacred, Tweedale argues. But it’s also about “personal safety,” he says. Theoretically, the amount of cryptocurrency passing through Pump.Fun wallets could make the team a target for potential fraud.
Tweedale says the goal is for the founders to become more publicly apparent in the future. But in the meantime, the question remains how best to reinvest the money Pump.Fun has made to both strengthen and expand the platform in the face of increased scrutiny and inevitable development headaches. “We are not here to make a quick buck, close the website and run away. We want to build something that will last,” says Tweedale.
The long-term vision, he says, is to transform Pump.Fun from a one-dimensional memecoin startup platform into a competitor to the largest social media platforms, but with the lion’s share of revenue going to users and creators. “Imagine Instagram or TikTok where you can invest in anything,” Tweedale says. “The pump interface — everything we have so far — is the earliest possible version of what we can imagine we want to do.”
Relatively before Pump.Fun several memecoins hit the market; only Dogecoin, original memecoin and a few others Shiba Inu, PepeAND Bang— achieved any notoriety. The complexity of developing memecoin and the cost of providing the liquidity necessary to enable simple trading constrained the amounts released.