In one of the internet’s stranger fringes, a unicorn with human breasts, a cheetah smoking a cigarette, and an animated Elon Musk in a traditional cloak sit cheek-by-jowl—the cast of a bad trip. A Word Art banner tops the page, a floating anachronism. Icons glitter, shimmy, bounce, and in other ways evade the chasing eye. Barely legible messages flick up in green, red and yellow, then vanish.
Yet beneath this belch of Internet weirdness and low-fi web design lies one of the fastest-growing cryptocurrency businesses ever: Pump.Fun, a platform for launching memecoins, a type of crypto coin whose value rises and falls in line with the popularity of the memes it references.
The platform went live in January 2024. In the 12 months since, it has been reported by third parties to have brought in more than $350 million in revenue through a 1 percent cut of trades.
Pump.Fun is the creation of three entrepreneurs in their early twenties: Noah Tweedale, Alon Cohen, and Dylan Kerler. The trio began as memecoin traders themselves, but grew tired of repeatedly falling victim to rug pulls—a type of scam whereby a coin issuer steals away with funds, leaving investors sitting on worthless tokens.
“Buying into 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.”
The three Pump.Fun cofounders, who met in England, have attempted to keep their identities a secret—Tweedale and Cohen continue to go publicly by their respective online pseudonyms, Sapijiju and A1on, while Kerler has little public association with Pump.Fun. But their names surfaced last year in corporate documents tied to the operation.
Tweedale agreed to meet with WIRED, but only on the condition that the whereabouts and details of his appearance remain undisclosed. When we met, he came across as earnest but somewhat on-edge—and he spoke at a mile a minute. He declined to answer questions about where the Pump.Fun operation is based or how many people it employs.
The secrecy is partly a reflection of an attitude common in the cryptosphere that the right to privacy is sacred, Tweedale claims. But it’s also about “personal security and safety,” he says. In theory, the amount of crypto passing through Pump.Fun wallets could make the team a target for would-be extortionists.
The intention is for the founders to become more public-facing in the future, Tweedale claims. But in the meantime, there is the matter of how best to reinvest the money that Pump.Fun has made to both harden and expand the platform in the face of increased scrutiny and inevitable growing pains. “We’re not here to make a quick buck, close down the website, and run away. We want to build something that lasts,” says Tweedale.
The long-term vision, he claims, is to transform Pump.Fun from a one-dimensional memecoin launchpad into a competitor to the largest social platforms, but where the lion’s share of revenues flow to users and creators. “Imagine Instagram or TikTok, where everything is investible,” says Tweedale. “The Pump UI—everything we have so far—is the earliest possible version of what you can imagine we want to do.”
Before Pump.Fun, relatively few memecoins came to market; only Dogecoin, the original memecoin, and a handful of others—like Shiba Inu, Pepe, and Bonk—achieved any sort of prominence. The complexity of developing a memecoin and the cost of supplying the liquidity necessary to make it easily tradable limited the amount that were released.
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