The Trenches are Back, But at What Cost?

With $PUMP soaring over 100% in the past two weeks, pump.fun has won back the hearts of the trenches and revived the onchain meme economy.

Inspired by the launchpad’s generous new fee model, sentiment and consensus have rallied around pump’s exploding popularity. However, pockets of the onchain community have denounced opportunistic devs for exploiting real-world tragedies to earn money.

Meanwhile, commentators predict that the opulence of pump’s creator fee model could provoke an unwelcome shift in the trenches.

Memecoin Trenches Overwhelmed with Charlie, Iryna “Tributes”

Memecoin traders, rejoice. The trenches are back. Humans with a moral compass, repent; tragedy and murder have become some of the biggest drivers of onchain activity. 

In the past week, pump.fun has twice recorded a daily all-time high in trading volume, with activity on both days, the 7th and 10th, centering around coins linked to high-profile murders. Dexscreener’s trending page clearly illustrates the trenches’ penchant for tragedy, with 6 out of the top 8 coins based around the deaths of Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska.

These coins are supposedly being launched as a “tribute” to the deceased and a unifying call for justice. However, the harsh reality is that memecoin ‘devs’ are deploying these tokens to generate revenue through pump.fun’s lucrative creator fees.

Creators of the biggest $CHARLIE coins netted over six figures in fees and token sales, enjoying significant profits off what most would call a tragic act of violence. Fellow memecoin traders have called for pump.fun to intervene, suggesting that these fees should be directed towards the victim’s families, rather than serial token deployers with over 500 coins to their name.

Others have called this kind of trading behaviour “truly disgusting”, declaring that “making money like this will haunt you”.

Traders Hurt by Dynamic Creator Fees

Pump.fun’s new dynamic creator fee model has undeniably been a resounding success. Since Project Ascend went live, creator fees have exploded on the platform, generating deployers over $16.7M in revenue in the past 7 days.

While this is undeniably great for token creators and makes launching through pump.fun an attractive proposition, traders are getting the short end of the stick. 

Under pump’s new fee model, traders are charged >1% on any coin with a market cap underneath 9,820 SOL, or $2.2M at current prices.

Comparatively, rival launchpads like bonk.fun charge a 1% fee on all coins on its bonding curve, followed by Raydium’s standard fee structure on all graduated coins. The disparity of fees has compelled some trench dwellers to call for a return to bonk.fun.

‘Devving’ More Profitable than Trading

Higher trading fees and generous creator rewards are forcing memecoin economists to rethink their strategy. If CT is to be believed, experienced traders appear to be rebranding themselves as token deployers, which some would argue is now a far more profitable endeavor.

The shift away from the traditional meme economy we know towards what alon et all are calling ‘Creator Capital Markets’ is wrought with philosophical dilemmas. As one commentator puts it, “devving” appears to have become an acceptable euphemism for rugging coins, perpetuated by a cutthroat “no-crying-in-the-casino” rhetoric.

Creator fees are obviously attractive, but they rely on a sufficiently large pool of traders to drive volume. Without traders, coins will struggle to generate the volume and attention required to graduate to an AMM. 

Dune Analytics data reinforces this trend. The number of daily token creators have almost doubled since September 1st, rising from 6,080 to 11,474. Meanwhile, the number of daily active addresses on the platform has remained relatively consistent.

Unsurprisingly, this suits pump.fun. The OG launchpad generates the lion’s share of its revenue when coins stay on the bonding curve, courtesy of the much higher protocol fee. Off the back of Kirk’s assassination, pump.fun recorded its best day’s revenue in the last 7 months.

If the trader-to-deployer exodus continues, the memecoin economy will find itself devoid of speculators and creators will slowly cannibalize themselves in front of an empty audience until pump is forced to re-adapt its fee structure.

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