Who Got into PUMP's ICO?

Happy Monday, Defiers!

Big Story:

Pumpfun blockbuster ICO provided retail access to one of crypto’s most successful startups but it was mostly a whales’ game

Here’s what’s happening today:

Bitcoin shatters new all-time highs
Pumpfun’s raises $500M in 12 minutes
Kamino adds support for tokenized stocks xStocks as collateral
Sharplink revealed its latest ETH purchase
Ripple’s RLUSD market cap passes $515M
Hyperliquid Layer 1 TVL grows to $2B
The Stellar development roadmap paves way for expansion and network scalability [SPONSORED]
Investment policy statements: Ending misalignment and empowering long-term vision in decentralized organizations [SPONSORED]

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Today’s Big Story

Pumpfun Raises $500M in 12 Minutes, But Who Really Got In?

The Solana memecoin factory just pulled off one of the largest and fastest ICOs in recent history. If their ambitions come to life, we could be witnessing one of a few times when everyday users, not just private investors, have a chance to participate in the upside (even if those users were mostly whales).

In just 12 minutes on July 12, pumpfun raised $500 million in a public sale of its native token, PUMP, selling 125 billion tokens at $0.004 each, or 12.5% of the planned 1 trillion total supply.

The sale is the fifth-largest in ICO history, if you actually believe Nicolas Maduro raised $735M for his Petro token. Setting aside Petro, only EOS managed to raise more via a public token offering, while the Telegram Open Network (TON) and Bitfinex (LEO) raised more, but in private token sales.

Pumpfun has been a memecoin kingmaker on Solana since launching in January 2024. It has facilitated the launch of more than 10 million tokens with zero-code deployment, and raked in almost $700M in fees, according to DeFiLlama.

Solana-based pumpfun has evolved from its early, lawless days as an emerging memecoin launchpad to become one of the most successful crypto platforms out there.

Bigger Vision

What does the ICO signal? They now have the cash to go after a much larger vision.

Founder Alon Cohen has said his ambition for pumpfun goes far beyond the memecoin casino into a gamified, communal experience. Pumpfun’s team seeks to evolve it into a cross between a trading venue and a social media platform, where launching tokens is as much about identity and content as it is about price action. In this paradigm, pump competes more directly with TikTok and Meta than Binance or Robinhood.

At the ICO price, pump has a fully diluted valuation of $4 billion, and started trading at a $5.6 billion FDV. TikTok is valued at $300 billion as of late 2024, and Meta’s market cap is in the trillions, so if pump achieves its huge ambition, the token is poised for upside of many multiples.

A Whales Game

But, it was mostly whales who were able to get PUMP tokens at the ICO price.

The ICO was not only fast, it was exclusive. The process was gated behind KYC, relied on centralized exchange listings (Gate, KuCoin, Kraken, and several other CEXs), and offered no immediate utility or governance functionality for the token.

A Dune Analytics dashboard created by @adam_tehc shows:

23,959 wallets passed KYC
10,147 wallets successfully purchased tokens
202 wallets spent over $1M each
Average purchase: ~$44,209 per wallet

And X account @SpotonChain says:

340 wallets captured over 60% of all tokens sold

The fact that such a huge sale was over in minutes suggests that bots and sophisticated buyers were ready to execute, pushing out smaller buyers.

Missing Tokens

Another wrinkle to the same is that there appear to be 25 billion tokens missing.

According to pumpfun’s initial announcement about the token and ICO, 15% of total supply was meant to be sold in the public token sale. Yet blockchain records show only 12.5% (125 billion tokens) were distributed. That leaves a gap of 2.5% (25 billion tokens), or over $100 million worth, unaccounted for — not a small amount, especially considering so many KYC-ed wallets didn’t manage to get in on the sale. So far, no explanation has been issued by pumpfun explaining the discrepancy.

Democratizing Access

Even so, if pumpfun’s ambitions come to life, this may be one of the rare moments in tech history when public buyers, not just VCs, had early access to the upside of a hyper-growth platform. Unlike most private companies that scale behind closed doors and list only after valuations hit the stratosphere, pumpfun opened its token sale to tens of thousands of participants.

What also sets pumpfun apart from most mega-ICOs of the past is that it didn’t raise money on the promise of future potential. The platform has already facilitated the creation of millions of tokens, generated over $240 million in fees in the first half of 2025, and is the undisputed leader of Solana’s memecoin meta. It’s one of the only corners of crypto right now with clear product market fit and viral user demand. The ICO wasn’t just speculative, it was the monetization of a proven, fast-scaling phenomenon.

In the meantime, competitors like letsBONK are rising fast, and Ethereum-based memecoin platforms may try to follow suit.

Pump has proven it can raise money. But the harder challenge lies ahead: executing on the expectations that drove this record-breaking ICO.

With love,

Cami, founder of The Defiant

🎬WATCH

Robinhood’s Big Crypto Bet with CEO Vlad Tenev

On the latest episode of The Defiant Podcast, The Defiant founder Cami Russo sat down with Vlad Tenev, co-founder and CEO of Robinhood, in Cannes to explore the firm’s recently announced major crypto moves, including bringing tokenized U.S. stocks to the EU and launching its own Ethereum L2 with Arbitrum tech.

From tokenized private shares to the long-term vision of blockchain adoption, Vlad shares insights on regulation, innovation, and the battle between Robinhood and Coinbase.