PumpFun Kicks Off Revenue Sharing

Leading Solana-based memecoin launchpad PumpFun has launched creator revenue sharing today, entitling coin creators to 50% of the PumpSwap revenue generated by their tokens.

PumpFun, which is the third most profitable protocol across DeFi after generating $638 million over the last year, released PumpSwap, its in-house decentralized exchange (DEX) and automated market maker (AMM), in March.

PumpSwap has processed more than $500 million in volume almost daily in May, and just surpassed the $100 million in total value locked (TVL) last week. The protocol is raking in between $200,000 and $300,000 per day, and from today, half of that will flow back to token creators.

The DEX and launchpad metrics have been slowly grinding back up as excitement returns to the memecoin market, after the air was sucked out of it following the LIBRA debacle in February.

According to the announcement, coin creators will earn 0.05% of their tokens’ trades in SOL, meaning that $10 million in trading volume nets the creator $5,000 worth of SOL.

The design has been met with some criticism, however. One trader, known as 0xRiver, said, “I think this is a horrible move, 99% of coins are legit cto [community takeover] coins, people don't want the dev, and now we are giving the dev money that he rugged; this is super bad imo…”

The concern centers around rewarding a “developer” or token creator who likely created a token as a rug pull, but still gets rewarded if the token takes off after they abandon it.