Bard

Pumpfun has officially lost the plot. I'm not sure what their endgame is here, but I know for a fact that nobody is going to read “Be the next Kimchi” and suddenly feel an overwhelming urge to sign up for Pumpfun and start buying shitters. I never thought we'd reach the point where this needs explaining, but absolutely nobody outside CT knows who Kimchi is. And a good chunk of CT knows that the whole “made $40M trading Trump” story is straight up larp and what he was actually doing, was deploying and rugging coins 24/7. The fact that, out of every ace this multibillion-dollar company could have up its sleeve, they chose to make Kimchi their poster boy speaks volumes about how out of touch they are with the space, the community that made them what they are, and the outside world as a whole. I'm telling you, there isn't a single normal adult who wakes up in the morning wanting to “trade internet trends.” Not a single one. Because what the fuck does trading internet trends even mean? These guys made their bread from memecoins, and whatever name they built for themselves in this industry was a direct consequence of coins that actually went somewhere. Pumpfun wouldn't have taken off the way it did without Sharkcat, and it wouldn't have captured the market share it did during AI season without GOAT and Fartcoin launching there. People buying “internet trends” with a lifespan of 24 hours, only to get thrown into endless PvP against increasingly sophisticated players across a dozen different pairs, is precisely why Pumpfun struggles to break into the mainstream and onboard retail that actually STAYS. And these absolute idiots have somehow decided to make that their entire selling point. You genuinely couldn't make this shit up. The average person Pumpfun is supposedly trying to onboard is drowning in bills, trying to make ends meet, and navigating a society that's becoming increasingly isolated. He doesn't give a fuck about speculating on internet trends. He probably doesn't even recognize most of them. What he wants, whether he realizes it or not, is to feel like he belongs somewhere. A place where he can make internet friends who share his humor, aesthetics, and beliefs. Somewhere he can log in after a shitty day, talk shit with like-minded people, and actually feel like he's part of something. A fucking community. And the funny thing is that memecoins, of all things, can genuinely provide that. I think people massively underestimate how many guys are sitting at their desks right now, aimlessly scrolling the internet, who would happily spend money to be part of an online community where they can make friends, share jokes, and rally behind something together. Take NEET, for example. I'm convinced that if you explained the whole “not open to work” movement to a thousand normies, a surprisingly large percentage would find the idea of joining a global community of people who share that attitude genuinely appealing. Now imagine telling them there's also a coin attached to that movement, and that if enough people rally behind it, they can potentially make money together. That's a much easier sell than asking them to gamble on whichever celebrity happened to tweet something stupid fifteen minutes ago. And it's not just NEET. Think of all the internet subcultures, recognizable characters, aesthetics, and movements that people can actually identify with. Things that give someone a reason to hold a coin, talk about it, make content around it, and bring their friends into it without needing a new catalyst every six hours. That's how you build something that lasts. Instead of building their campaign around any of that, Pumpfun decided to spend millions telling people they could become the next Kimchi, a complete nobody to the audience they're supposedly trying to attract, and inviting them to gamble on internet trends. They actually spent millions of dollars on this stunt. It's genuinely incredible how disconnected they've become from reality, their own customer base, and seemingly basic common sense. My father used to always tell me to never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity. And I'd genuinely love to attribute Pumpfun's incompetence to stupidity, but that's not the case here. They've made hundreds of millions from coins that people actually wanted to own. Coins that went to hundreds of millions in market cap, made entire communities rich, and brought thousands of new people into the ecosystem. They know this model works because it's the very model that made them rich. But if having everyone PvP the same Elon tweet through twelve different pairings and launch modes means they can squeeze another 10% out of trading fees, I'm increasingly convinced they'll happily sacrifice everything else to get it. And at this point, it's becoming pretty difficult to pretend otherwise. I think there are fatigue signals everywhere, and every day we're getting a little closer to the end of the Pumpfun dynasty despite a bunch of terminal badges trying day and night to convince you otherwise. Someone will eventually build a place where people actually want to stay, where communities are worth more than the fees generated from destroying them. And when that happens, I genuinely don't think Pumpfun will understand why everyone left.