Written by: San
Recently, the launch of Pump.fun’s livestreaming feature has reignited the popularity of what was once considered the largest meme token launch platform, which many thought had already faded from the spotlight.
Alongside this, the price of the $Pump token has also soared. The announcement of a buyback combined with the rollout of innovative features pushed the price of $PUMP from around $0.003 at the end of August to the current $0.0085, a 283% increase in just half a month, with its market cap surpassing $3 billions.
On the other hand, since the livestreaming feature went live, Pump.fun creators have been earning over $2 millions in daily revenue, with a record-breaking weekly creator income of $15.5 millions.
Many users in the market view the launch of Pump.fun’s livestreaming feature as a new paradigm for CCM (creators capital market), calling this update a breakthrough in technological innovation within the crypto space.
On the surface, it appears to be a win-win situation: the new feature has created numerous rags-to-riches stories for retail investors, with both token prices and platform revenues rising. Fans support their favorite streamers by investing rather than gifting, but behind all this seems to lie a more complex and unsettling reality.
Celebrity Token Cases
BUN COIN
BunnyFuFuu is a former professional League of Legends esports player who, before engaging with Pump.Fun, already had over 210,000 followers on X and 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube thanks to his esports career.
On September 14, BunnyFuFuu launched his own token, BUN COIN, during a livestream and continued to promote it on X for the following two days. This dedicated “building” helped BUN COIN stand out among the many livestream tokens.
BUN COIN started with a market cap of just $300,000 and reached a peak of $10 millions within 48 hours of launch, with a maximum increase of over 3000%. However, today the price of BUN COIN has dropped all the way down to a current market cap of $1.6 millions, with a daily decline of over 50%.
Token CA: HQDTzNa4nQVetoG6aCbSLX9kcH7tSv2j2sTV67Etpump
KIND
The original intention of the KIND token was to “spread kindness.” The creator promoted it through charity-themed livestreams, claiming that for every $1 purchased, $0.1 would be donated to small streamers in need.
This positive narrative attracted widespread attention. Since its launch on September 7, KIND reached a peak market cap of $55 millions in the early hours of today, with a 24-hour increase of over 20 times and nearly $32 millions in trading volume within 24 hours. However, its current market cap has also seen a significant pullback to $18 millions.
Token CA: V5cCiSixPLAiEDX2zZquT5VuLm4prr5t35PWmjNpump
BAGWORK
Compared to the celebrity endorsement of BUN COIN and the positive narrative of KIND, BAGWORK’s story is more about “stunts.” Bagwork originates from a boxing term meaning professional training on a punching bag, and BAGWORK, inspired by this, calls on everyone to fight for their crypto assets.
At the same time, BAGWORK is currently the most influential and widely spread livestream token in Pump.fun’s livestream section. There’s no doubt that the BAGWORK team knows how to put on a show.
On the first day of livestreaming, BAGWORK team members stormed into a sports stadium to livestream and were arrested during the broadcast. The next day, they stole a fitness influencer’s hat in his gym, were caught on the spot, and slapped. In the past two days, another BAGWORK team member tried to jump off the Santa Monica Pier but was stopped by the police. The BAGWORK team has promised to perform a new stunt every day for the next two weeks to promote the token and attract more attention.
This series of seemingly crazy actions did indeed drive up the price of the BAGWORK token. On September 13, its market cap was only $3 millions, but after 48 hours of “crazy livestreaming,” the token’s market cap once approached $100 millions, before falling back to $15 millions.
Token CA: 7Pnqg1S6MYrL6AP1ZXcToTHfdBbTB77ze6Y33qBBpump
What Has Livestreaming Brought to Pump.fun?
In the traditional internet livestreaming industry, streamers earn money by playing games or performing talents to attract fans who reward them with gifts. For fans, gifting is purely a consumption behavior, not an investment expecting financial returns.
But in Pump.fun’s livestreams, fans’ rewards to streamers become token purchases. After the streamer puts on enough of a show to attract more buyers, fans can cash out for a profit and then look for the next streamer worth investing in. In this process, fans seem to take on the role of traditional MCN agencies, investing funds and resources in each streamer and profiting from the commercial value realized after the streamer goes viral.
More crucially, in this model, the best strategy for streamers to profit is often to sell tokens for cash after the price is pumped. This makes the relationship between fans and streamers very “twisted”: on one hand, fans want the streamer to put on a better show to attract more buyers, but on the other, they want to dump their tokens, turning their “support” for the streamer into a loss.
In fact, the three well-known token cases mentioned above are already among the best performers out of countless livestream tokens. More often, tokens quickly go to zero after the streamer’s popularity wanes or the stream ends. Does this script sound familiar? That’s right—the market inside Pump.fun before the livestream feature was launched was the same. According to a Solidus Labs analysis report of 7 million Pump.fun tokens, nearly 99% of tokens ultimately go to zero. This ratio has not improved since the livestream feature went live, and successful celebrity cases remain statistical outliers.
So what has the livestream feature really brought to Pump.fun? For now, it seems to be just a change in the medium of dissemination.
Divergent Market Views
The market controversy surrounding Pump.fun’s livestream feature also reflects some issues.
Supporters mainly focus on technological innovation and creator empowerment. They believe this model eliminates the exploitation of middlemen on traditional platforms, allowing up-and-coming creators with potential to enjoy income opportunities almost equal to those of top Twitch creators from the very beginning.
Moreover, in today’s attention economy, the marketing power generated by livestream video far exceeds that of text media. Pump.fun itself is a product of the attention economy, and the livestream feature is merely an iteration and upgrade of previous versions.
Critics, on the other hand, focus more on structural flaws and content risks. Judging by the price trends of most tokens, these livestream tokens almost only rise during the streamer’s broadcast and plummet after the stream ends. Many community users question their ability to create long-term value.
In terms of content regulation, although Pump.fun has restricted some prohibited content, there are still plenty of bloody, violent, and pornographic livestreams on the platform, which drive up token prices by satisfying users’ curiosity.
Rational Thinking Amidst the Bubble Boom
From an investment perspective, the launch of Pump.fun’s livestream feature has indeed created many profit opportunities. As long as the streamer you follow is “active enough” and you discover such a “hidden gem” earlier than others, it’s easy to make a profit.
But from another perspective, when we strip away the glamorous facade of Web3 innovation and the creator economy, Pump.fun’s livestream model exposes a more fundamental problem: how to protect the interests of ordinary participants while incentivizing creators.
Existing data shows that the livestream model is unsustainable: 99% of tokens go to zero, and more than 99% of participants have already lost money and exited, while creators and the platform secure stable profits.
It’s hard to call such a model a healthy ecosystem. It’s more like a well-packaged wealth redistribution game, merely using the narrative of technological innovation to mask the essence of a traditional zero-sum game.
The real issue is not the innovative form of livestream token launches itself, but the fundamental flaws in the incentive mechanism. When creators’ earnings are completely decoupled from the long-term interests of the community, and when the platform’s profits are built upon the widespread losses of its participants, such a model is destined to be nothing more than a fleeting speculative frenzy.
We cannot know whether Pump.fun’s livestreams can sustain their current popularity and continue to produce “hit tokens,” but what we can confirm is that investing in these hit livestreams carries considerable risk. We hope all investors DYOR and pay attention to risk control.
