Why did PumpFun's financing and token issuance cause controversy?

💠 Financing Timing and Motivation

How should I put it? If we apply the logic of stocks, the essence of token issuance should be for financing. According to this logic, the project process should be:

Product → Financing → Mature Product → TGE → Airdrop → Product Ecosystem

or

Product → Financing → TGE → Airdrop → Mature Product → Product Ecosystem

The key point here is that financing should occur before the mature product and product ecosystem. The key to token financing should be to push the product and ecosystem towards maturity, and the objective of financing is to provide cost assurance for improving the product and developing the ecosystem.

However, for #PumpFun, the product and ecosystem may already be relatively mature. Of course, there is room for improvement in the PumpFun product, but in fact, there are already @virtuals_io and @believeapp in the market, leaving limited space for greater innovation for PumpFun.

Financing and token issuance at this time for #PUMP may raise some suspicions of “token issuance to harvest investors.”

💠 Financing Valuation and Revenue Trend

$PUMP financing is valued at 4 billion (400 million USD),

@xingpt has compiled some FDV/annual revenue statistics of DEX and DeFi protocols. (I’ve added a watermark for him).

Comparing, it can be seen that PUMPFUN is somewhat overvalued. Some friends say that PUMPFUN's annual income is more than this. But actually, the MEME ecosystem of Solana is showing some downturn.

According to the cross-chain data from Solana's cross-chain bridge DeBridge, in January 2025, Solana had a net inflow of funds; however, from February to now, the Solana ecosystem has clearly seen a net outflow.

@0xcrypto_max just mentioned the awkward situation of “Solana's meme has gone from not being able to go up on BN to recently not being able to go up on exchanges like Bybit.”

It can be seen that PUMP’s revenue may decline next, so PUMP’s valuation of 4 billion USD may be somewhat overvalued.

@monkeyjiang directly anticipated the script after $PUMP token issuance: "Just launched, a wave of hype, then many investors get trapped. Then a slow decline, and finally sideways trading."

Bee Brother calculated the FDV/annual revenue of #Debridge ($DBR), which also belongs to the Solana ecosystem.

$DBR's FDV is 139.25M, annual revenue 10.14M, giving a ratio of 13.73. Compared to the previous table, this is also relatively low; $DBR may also be somewhat undervalued.

💠 Airdrop Expectations

While PUMP has a high valuation for financing, it completely avoids mentioning the airdrop. @sleepy0x13 believes that “Don’t fantasize that Pump Fun will issue an airdrop anymore.”

An airdrop not only fulfills past promises but is also a way to give back to users. The relationship between users and platforms has always been symbiotic.

Not all projects lack vision; I still want to use Debridge ($DBR) as an example.

$DBR airdropped 600 million tokens last year, with an initial listing price of 0.03713 and a minimum of 0.01864. Let’s be conservative and calculate at 0.025, leading to a total claim amount of 437 million tokens, valued at $10.925 million.

In the second round of airdrops in April to May this year, 23,200,200 $DBR was distributed. This round saw $DBR between 0.01904 and 0.01388, conservatively calculated at 0.015, making the second round airdrop worth $0.348 million.

The total value of the two rounds of airdrops is $11.273 million, which has already exceeded Debridge's annual revenue.

Thus, after the second round of airdrops ended on May 17, $DBR continued to decline due to selling pressure from the airdrop, but there were no negative voices. Instead, Bee Brother feels that @deBridgeFinance has great vision.

Looking at PUMP again, it is acknowledged as an innovation, but it has indeed caused many people substantial losses. While airdrops cannot compensate for users' trading losses, they may soothe users' emotions.

💠 In Conclusion

It is indeed rare to see projects begin financing and token issuance during the mature or even declining stages of their products and ecosystems, raising doubts about their motivations. Furthermore, with such a high valuation for financing, there doesn’t seem to be much emphasis on airdrops for users...