According to Blockworks, pump.fun plans to raise $1 billion through an ICO, with a valuation of $4 billion. Sources added that this token sale will be divided into private and public rounds, but it is not confirmed when the tokens will be listed or if they will be issued on the pump.fun platform.

Investor DeFi Cheetah from Velocity Capital stated that through an unverified private channel, the rumors he heard about pump.fun's financing include: no airdrops, but a whitelist will be set for the public sale; the financing target for the public sale is $800 million, with a valuation of $5 billion; VCs will also have a quota of $200 million, with the same valuation of $5 billion; the public sale will be conducted on most mainstream CEXs, which are preparing for it.

As one of the engines of last year's Meme bull market and one of the most profitable protocols, there have been multiple rumors about pump.fun issuing tokens. However, each time it has been a 'wolf is coming' scenario, and pump.fun co-founder Alon has also denied rumors about a pump.fun token.

But times have changed; the changing environment of the Meme market and intensified competition among token issuance platforms have forced pump.fun to make choices, and the wolf may really have come this time. The decline of the Solana Meme trend has made pump.fun resort to self-help. In January of this year, the personal Meme coin TRUMP issued by former U.S. President Trump saw its market cap exceed $10 billion in one day, not only achieving many on-chain successes but also attracting outside funds into the crypto circle. When the Argentine president issued his own token LI­BRA in February to harvest the market, leading to the decline of this wave of celebrity token issuance, people naively thought it was just a short-term emotional correction in the Meme market. However, in hindsight, this 'money-picking market' has become the last carnival before the decline of the Solana Meme trend.

According to Dune data, the number of tokens created on the pump.fun platform and the graduation rate (the ratio of successfully launched tokens to total created tokens) has drastically declined since February, with the number of tokens created dropping from a peak of 50,000-70,000 daily to 20,000-30,000 daily, and the weekly graduation rate for tokens being less than 1%. Meanwhile, active users on pump.fun are also decreasing. According to Dune data, the daily active wallets on the pump.fun platform reached 150,000-200,000 from December 2024 to February 2025, but after February, the number of daily active wallets decreased by about 50%. Only 70,000-100,000 remain.

After the decline of activity in the token issuance group and among users, the accompanying result is the drop in trading volume and revenue for the pump.fun platform. According to Dune data, the weekly trading volume on the pump.fun platform could reach $2-3 billion from November 2024 to early February 2025, while after mid-February 2025 (after the Argentine president issued tokens), the weekly trading volume was only between $700 million and $1.5 billion, a decline of about 50%.

The pump.fun platform has accumulated fee income of about $700 million, and according to overseas KOL BREAD, its efficiency ratio has surpassed top Web2 tech companies like Nvidia and Apple.

But no one complains about the speed of making money being slow; they only worry about not making enough. During the peak period of Solana Meme (from November 2024 to February 2025), pump.fun’s platform daily fee income was between $2 million and $5 million, whereas after the decline of the Solana Meme trend, even after launching pump-swap, daily fee income dropped to between $1 million and $2 million.

Many times, the success of a project may simply depend on grasping trends and making few mistakes, or even doing less; however, when the trend is gone, a project must do more and must do things right to survive. The success of pump.fun is attributed to the rise of the Solana Meme trend and the upgrade of narrative capabilities in the Meme market, but the decline of the trend and exhaustion of market narratives cannot be stopped.

At this last moment of sunset, token issuance has naturally become the last means of self-rescue. For tool-type or 'shovel-selling' projects, if there is a solid business model and continuous cash flow, they will not easily issue tokens, because the regulatory risks and operational pressures brought by token issuance are not as beneficial as existing revenues; but when a project encounters difficulties or when 'shovels' are in oversupply in the market, regrouping, expanding the project's narrative perspective, and going the traditional route to go public and issue tokens can also enable the project to last.