In one of the weirder edges of the internet, a unicorn with human breasts, a cheetah smoking a cigarette and an animated Elon Musk in a traditional cloak sitting cheek by jowl – the cast of a bad trip. At the top of the page is a Word Art banner, a floating anachronism. Icons glitter, wobble, bounce, and otherwise elude the pursuing eye. Barely readable messages appear in green, red and yellow and then disappear.
But beneath this burst of internet madness and low-fi web design lies one of the fastest growing cryptocurrency companies ever: Pump.Fun, a platform for launching memecoins, a type of cryptocurrency whose value rises and falls in accordance with the popularity of the memes it refers to.
The platform went live in January 2024. In the 12 months since, third parties have reported that it has raked in more than $350 million in revenue from a 1 percent trading decline.
Pump.Fun is the creation of three entrepreneurs in their early twenties: Noah Tweedale, Alon Cohen and Dylan Kerler. The trio started out as memecoin traders themselves, but grew tired of repeatedly falling victim to backjacking – a form of scam in which a coin issuer sneaks out with money, leaving investors sitting on worthless tokens.
“Buying memecoins was a very unsafe thing to do… Everything was designed to suck money out of people,” Tweedale told WIRED in an interview late last year. “The idea with Pump was to build something where everyone was on the same playing field.”
Pump.Fun's three co-founders, who met in England, have tried to keep their identities secret: Tweedale and Cohen continue to publicly use their respective online pseudonyms, Sapijiju and A1on, while Kerler has little public association with Pump.Fun. But their names surfaced last year in company 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 secret. When we met, he seemed serious but somewhat tense – and he spoke at the rate of a mile. He declined to answer questions about where the Pump.Fun operation is located or how many people work there.
The secrecy is partly a reflection of a common attitude in the crypto sphere that the right to privacy is sacrosanct, Tweedale claims. But it's also about “personal safety and security,” he says. In theory, the amount of crypto passing through Pump.Fun's wallets could make the team a target for would-be extortionists.
The intention is for the founders to be approached more publicly in the future, Tweedale claims. But in the meantime, the question is how best to reinvest the money Pump.Fun has made to both harden and expand the platform, despite the increasing scrutiny and inevitable growing pains. “We're not here to make a quick buck, close the website and run. We want to build something that will last,” says Tweedale.
The long-term vision, he claims, is to transform Pump.Fun from a one-dimensional memecoin launch pad into a competitor to the largest social platforms, but where the lion's share of revenue flows to users and creators. “Imagine Instagram or TikTok, where everything is investable,” says Tweedale. “The Pump UI – everything we have so far – is the earliest possible version of anything you can imagine we want to do.”
Before Pump. Nice, relative few memecoins came onto the market; only Dogecoin, the original memecoin, and a handful of others – such as Shiba Inu, Pepe and Bonk – achieved any kind of fame. The complexity of developing a memecoin and the cost of providing the liquidity needed to make it easily tradable limited the amount released.
