Hey, check this out — something interesting just happened in the crypto space and I wanted to run it by you.
Recently, the exchange Kraken ran into a bit of a mess during the public sale of PUMP tokens, which were launched by a memecoin platform called Pump.fun. It's built on Solana and basically makes it super easy to launch meme tokens. Anyway, they had a public sale for the PUMP token at $0.004, and everything sold out in under a minute — crazy demand.
Turns out, a lot of Kraken users who showed up on time weren’t able to place their orders because the exchange hit some kind of system limitation — in other words, their backend couldn’t handle the surge in traffic.
Kraken co-founder Arjun Sethi acknowledged the issue. According to him, they’ve reviewed order logs and user activity, and now they plan to compensate affected users by distributing PUMP tokens for free. No action is needed — the process will be automatic. They haven’t said how many users are affected, but apparently, Kraken will start emailing people "soon."
Here’s the kicker — Kraken will have to buy those PUMP tokens from the secondary market, and the price has already jumped to around $0.0067 — a noticeable premium over the original $0.004 sale price.
Also, Kraken wasn’t the only exchange that struggled. Users on Bybit complained too — some said they placed orders just 9 seconds after the sale started and still missed out. At first, Bybit blamed an API delay supposedly caused by Pump.fun, but they later edited that part out of their statement. So yeah, things got messy there as well.
So now I’m wondering — on the one hand, props to Kraken for admitting the issue and trying to make things right. But on the other hand, is it really fair to even take part in these ultra-hyped token launches when it seems like your chances of getting in depend more on luck than speed?
Would you even bother with token sales like this, knowing that you could do everything right and still walk away with nothing?