Pump.fun completely round-tripped its status as the leading Solana casino

The platform's revenues are down to $667K in a day, after a long-running downward trend.

Pump.fun, the massively popular Solana casino, completely round-tripped its status as the leading Solana casino. The platform’s revenues are now down to $667K in a day, continuing a long-running downward trend.

The meme token aggregator is no longer reliably generating millions in fees. As of March 8, daily revenues fell to $667K, the lowest in seven months. While Pump.fun still massively outperforms other protocols in terms of revenues, there are no signs of the downward trend ending.

Just a day later, Pump.fun posted a little over $110K in daily revenues. The meme token platform also reflected the general loss of optimism for crypto, as even major coins sank deeper in the red. The total fees for the platform fell off a cliff, despite hovering above $1M in the past week. Within days, the fees were down another 90%.

The platform achieved its peak daily revenues in January, surpassing $15M in a single day. The downward trend continues, diminishing the platform’s returns every day. The platform has almost returned to its slump from September 2024, but this time, there are doubts about starting a new casino cycle.

One of the reasons for the lower fees is the low number of graduating tokens, which brings a 1.5SOL ‘graduation fee’. The other source of income is the 1% trading fee for all token swaps. In the past day, only 194 tokens graduated to Raydium with sufficient liquidity.

Only 7,233 wallets were engaging with making new tokens in the past day. Pump.fun still saw over 11K new launches, though most remained in their bonding curves.

The platform’s activity slowed down to 159K new addresses, down from a recent maximum of 292K active addresses. The loss of users arrived after Pump.fun ended its random casino stage, where any meme had a chance of making it big. Instead, the platform started carrying more curated tokens, with the risk of insider influence.

Pump.fun trading volumes also continued to decline, as traders became discouraged by aggressive rug pulls and sniping. At the peak of the cycle, Pump.fun carried up to $3B in value. Currently, the daily trading turnover is a little over $77M. The lack of ‘trenches’ traders also means launches may become unfavorable, as they would not be able to raise sufficient liquidity. The recent series of launches relies on teams to provide liquidity to move the token to Raydium.

More than 72% of Pump.fun traffic comes from direct visits, with 7.73% from Google traffic. Pump.fun is tied to crypto-friendly countries, with the biggest share of traffic coming from the USA. The Pump.fun phenomenon brought new cohorts of users, but did not lead to crypto mass adoption. Few of the meme tokens built communities, and none had any utility, unlike meme tokens from the previous cycle.

The positions of meme tokens correlate with the performance of Bitcoin (BTC) and the general sentiment of the crypto market. As such, meme tokens are not counter-cyclical, and have fallen deeper compared to other assets.

The recent meme token cycle raised doubts about bringing more value to crypto. In total, Pump.fun extracted $500M in the market, liquidating the income through SOL sales. The new value from retail buyers was quickly taken out of the market, and did not move to BTC or other crypto assets. The last $400M in value were extracted between August 2024 and January, tapping the peak meme cycle coinciding with the US elections narrative.

This led crypto analysts to view the 2024 cycle as aggressively PvP, where the few winners also caused deep losses for users. Pump.fun was seen as one of the most active PvP markets, which only achieved its fees and turnover based on a wide user base willing to lose SOL for the chance of winning with one hot meme token.