Disclaimer: This note focuses on the conceptual and cultural “big idea” behind Pump.fun, not on financial modelling, valuation precision, or investment recommendations. Figures cited are public estimates as of October 2025 and serve only to illustrate the scale of potential outcomes, not to suggest price targets or forecasts.
Introduction
Most crypto liquid research still treats tokens like small-cap equities: describing the product, listing risks, and building discounted cashflow models on early data. But that misses the point. Crypto today feels more like 1998 internet: volatile, crowded, and already public. In that world, I don’t think the right mindset is that of an equities analyst, and I’d rather think like a venture investor trying to find the future Amazon when it was worth under $1bn. The skill isn’t in measuring risk, it’s in understanding how big something could get.
Viewed through that lens, Pump.fun stands out as one of the few crypto projects with genuine consumer pull. Alongside Polymarket, it may be the first onchain product that feels natively cultural. Both are early examples of crypto reaching the mainstream not through infrastructure, but through entertainment. While most people currently see exchanges, blockchains, and stablecoins as the only trifecta of massive outcomes in this industry, Pump is a bet on what people actually do once the rails exist.
Pump today
Pump began as a Solana-based memecoin launchpad, but has since become a functioning consumer business with real product-market fit (which isn’t the norm in crypto, especially for tokens >$1bn market cap). The platform generated roughly $724mln in the past year, and still generated $37mln in the last month despite a more bearish environment and trenchers migrating from Solana to the Binance ecosystem. Based on the recent developments, it wouldn’t be crazy to think that Pump now has a $1mln/day revenue floor. This isn’t a speculative promise of revenue: it’s a working, cash-flowing network, with over $100mln already distributed to creators, 45,000 earning more than $100, and the company probably still holding over $1.5bn in cash.
Live streaming is the venture bet
The team’s next frontier is live streaming, and that shift changes everything. It taps into a universal behaviour that has defined the modern internet: watching other people live. Twitch proved this behaviour could sustain a multibillion-dollar business, generating $1.8bn in 2024. Yet despite its scale, Twitch’s model is deeply asymmetric. Viewers collectively pay millions per month through subscriptions, bits, and donations, yet have no economic upside. They fund creators and platforms, but they never participate in the value they help generate. They are still the product.
Pump reimagines that relationship. Its model closes the loop between creators and audiences by turning attention itself into an investable asset. Viewers on Pump can back creators directly, not just as fans but as stakeholders. Every stream becomes a tradable micro-asset. If a creator or community gains traction, early supporters can benefit financially from that success. Instead of spending $5 on a Twitch subscription for the privilege of ad-free viewing, a Pump user can spend $5 to acquire a token tied to the same creator, one that might appreciate as that creator grows. Engagement becomes ownership; fandom becomes investment.
This solves the fundamental asymmetry of traditional internet entertainment. In the 2000s, YouTube democratized distribution by allowing anyone to publish content. In the 2010s, Twitch and TikTok democratized audience building by making discovery algorithmic. What blockchain now enables is the democratization of economics, allowing both creators and audiences to share in the upside of culture. For creators, that means faster payouts, global reach, and real ownership of their communities. For viewers, it means the chance to be early, to participate, and to profit from the entertainment they help amplify.
The Jobs-to-Be-Done framework from Clayton Christensen helps clarify this appeal. Functionally, Pump lets anyone monetize attention instantly without ads, brands, or intermediaries. It saves time, removes friction, and increases earnings per viewer by orders of magnitude. Emotionally, it taps into the same universal aspirations that have defined every breakout consumer platform: the desire to feel special, to belong, to improve, and to be free. Tokens make belonging tangible and success shareable. A viewer no longer signals support with likes or subs, but with real economic participation.
This shift from top-down to bottom-up entertainment is profound. For decades, TV networks dictated what people watched. YouTube inverted that hierarchy by letting the crowd decide, creating a new generation of creators whose audiences dwarfed traditional media. Today, we spend more hours on YouTube and TikTok than on all television combined. Pump’s innovation is to make this ownership-native. It adds a missing layer to digital entertainment, one that aligns financial and emotional incentives between those who create and those who consume.
The next challenge: reputation and longevity
The team is clearly aware that most coins on Pump eventually go to zero, which creates reputational risk for creators and limits long-term participation. The first step toward fixing this has been to separate the creator from the token. Creator coins largely failed because they were directly tied to a person’s reputation; once sentiment turned, both the coin and the creator’s credibility suffered. Pump is instead attaching tokens to performance and output, turning each stream into an investable unit of work. This seems anecdotal but can make participation feel more like backing a business in its early days than speculating on an individual’s popularity.
The team also seems aware that different products require different user expectations. A clear distinction between the memecoin launchpad and the streaming product could help attract new audiences without the stigma attached to meme-driven marketing. The focus is shifting from speculation to utility: using tokens as access passes or benefits, much like Twitch subscriptions, or integrating ads whose revenue flows to the streamer or burns tokens. In this model, users extract value from participation itself, regardless of the token’s price action.
Ultimately, the path to longevity mirrors the broader trajectory of consumer crypto: abstract the blockchain complexity away. For Pump to reach mass adoption, it likely needs to make the “token” invisible, offering an experience that feels like Twitch, only economically fairer for everyone involved.
Sizing the upside: a simple risk–reward framework
At roughly $1mln/day in revenue, Pump is already a profitable network. Even assuming full token unlocks, that baseline supports its current valuation, which implies limited downside risk.
Twitch offers the most relevant comparable: it’s said to be valued around $50bn. TwitchTracker reports 50,000–100,000 concurrent live streams versus only 100–500 on Pump today. If Pump eventually captures 5% of Twitch’s scale (already captured 1% at peak when it launched), that would mean a roughly 10× increase from current levels. All else being equal (similar trading volumes, fee splits, etc) and not accounting for anything else, that could translate to about $4bn annualized revenue.
Applying even a conservative 10× revenue multiple implies a $40bn valuation in a success scenario, roughly matching Twitch’s. The base case ($1mln/day) remains durable, while the upside case resembles the economics of one of the most valuable streaming businesses in the world. It’s an oversimplified heuristic, but it captures the essence of the trade: limited downside, multi-billion upside, and a credible path to get there.
Conclusion
For investors, the bet is simple. Pump already behaves like a functioning growth company: real revenue, clear product-market fit, and massive TAM. Yet it trades like a speculative token, at only 3.5–4× revenue, a multiple more suited to a saturated exchange than a fast-growing consumer network. In venture terms, that’s the equivalent of buying Amazon in 1999, not because it was cheap, but because its category was inevitable.
The biggest opportunities in crypto are no longer purely financial, but cultural. Ownership is the new entertainment. Pump.fun captures that shift better than any project in the market today. It turns fans into investors, creators into owners, and viewers into participants. If the streaming thesis holds, this could be the first multi-billion consumer network built entirely onchain and a reminder that crypto’s endgame is not just new infrastructure, but new behaviour.