Pump.Fun, the Solana-based protocol that enables users to create and gamble on memecoins, has soared in activity, in part due to the protocol’s popular frontend feature that enables users to live stream their reactions to their token’s price movements.
However, the ability to self-broadcast on Pump.Fun was disabled indefinitely on Monday, according to a notice from the protocol’s team and community members in the protocol’s Telegram channel.
“To ensure the absolute safety of our users, we will be pausing the live streaming functionality on the site for an indefinite time period until the moderation infrastructure is ready to deal with the heightened levels of activity,” the notice said. “We will also provide creators and users greater visibility into individual moderation decisions to ensure everyone understands the process and outcomes.”
The change comes about three-and-a-half months after the memecoin factory first introduced live streaming in August. While the feature initially was lighthearted, with some merely dancing to their token’s price movements, live streaming on Pump.Fun has taken a dark turn recently, with some including creators’ threats to harm themselves or others if their token does not pump to reach a certain market cap, as well as references to extremely vulgar content.
Read More: Solana-Based Memecoin Generator Pump.Fun Shatters Adoption, Usage Records
One live stream for a token with the ticker ROVER included the creator declaring how he’d shoot his dog if the memecoin did not reach an $11 million market cap. Another gruesome stream featured a person threatening to take their own life, which appeared to be faked, while others have noted a whole range of aggressively violent and sexual content in these livestreams.
One of Pump.Fun’s founders, who goes by @A1lon9 on X, said on Sunday that the ROVER live stream, alongside hundreds of streams that violated the platform’s terms, has already been taken down. He noted that the Pump.Fun team already has a large team of moderators to weed out illicit content on the front end, including images, videos, live streams, and comments. Pornographic content, however, is allowed.
“Although we strongly stand for free speech and expression, it’s our responsibility to ensure that users don’t see clearly repulsive/dangerous content and that bad actors aren’t given a platform to act as they wish,” @A1lon9 said on X last week.
Neither @A1lon9 nor Pump.Fun immediately responded to Unchained’s request for additional comments for this story.
Signs of a Market Top?
“My thought is that it’s a signal for meme top,” one investor at a venture firm, who asked to remain anonymous due to it being a sensitive topic, told Unchained. “[Pump.Fun] will face regulatory backlash very soon. [The unhinged livestreams are] an indicator that the platform got too popular.”
Arthur Cheong, the founder and CIO of investment company DeFiance Capital, also stated on X Monday that “the capital allocated to memecoins are reallocating to other sector[s] pretty aggressively now.” The market cap for the entire crypto industry has dropped 2% in the last 24 hours, but the total market cap of memecoins specifically created on Pump.Fun has declined more, dipping 5.3% to $6.3 billion in the same period, per CoinGecko.
“Moderation is a growing pain of any social platform. [Pump.Fun] either figure[s] it out or they die,” wrote Andy Chen, who is on the research and investment team at early-stage investment firm Superscrypt, in a Telegram message to Unchained. However, the problematic live streams are only “existential if they let it run rampant, but I think the bar for sufficient moderation is lower than people would expect,” Chen added.
Pump.Fun has been breaking its all-time highs for usage and activity. For example, daily active addresses reached a record level of nearly 220,000 from just 90,790 a month ago, according to a Dune Analytics dashboard created by Jack Gorman, a data scientist at venture firm Variant. Meanwhile, the protocol has also generated $70.6 million in fees for the month of November, more than the last three months combined, data from DefiLlama shows.
Since launching in January 2024, Pump.Fun has been responsible for creating 3.8 million tokens, with 23,778 tokens launched on Monday alone.
