Pump.fun Bleeds Out: Offers $30,000 Monthly Salary to Battle FOMO for 'Trading Influencer'

Aug 10, 20:47

Original Title: "$20,000 Signing Bonus + $30,000 Monthly Salary: The Story Behind Pump.fun Digging in the Corner of FOMO"
Original Author: Golem, Odaily Planet Daily

The current Meme market is quite fragmented, with little intersection between overseas users and Chinese users in terms of chain ecology and transaction tools. This fragmentation not only causes global Meme funds to flow into various ecosystems but also makes even the "gossip" unclear.

On August 8, gossip about "Pump.fun investing heavily to mine the corner of a competitor" spread like wildfire in the overseas Meme community.

Initially leaked by overseas user CLR, it was stated that Pump.fun is using an incentive program to attract users to migrate from the FOMO platform to Pump.fun. According to the disclosed agreement document, Pump.fun plans to provide a one-time $20,000 signing bonus to eligible users and pay a monthly $30,000 fixed salary. The agreement requires signing users to migrate their FOMO platform funds and trading positions to Pump.fun; use a new wallet that has not been used by other platforms before; link the X account to the Pump.fun wallet; publicly declare on the X homepage that the wallet is the only public wallet; permanently delete and close the FOMO platform account.

Furthermore, users must meet the actual trading requirements, including completing at least $25,000 in monthly trading volume on Pump.fun (or 25% of the previous average monthly trading volume on the FOMO platform). It is clear that in order to poach users from the FOMO platform, Pump.fun has decided to spare no expense this time.

Full Text of the Agreement in Chinese Translation (Source: 0xAA)

From a business perspective, this is a normal company's competitive behavior, with no legal issues. In entertainment platforms or user-centric business models, companies often pay KOLs or users with significant fan influence to leave the competitor's platform and maintain exclusive representation on their platform. This competitive model is also quite common in China, such as the early short video live streaming platforms, where platforms like Douyin, Kuaishou, Bilibili, and Huya offered sky-high exclusive signing contracts to internet celebrities.

But the whole incident initially left bystanders confused: who is FOMO?

Pump.fun is the largest overseas token issuance platform, with fee revenue consistently ranking in the top five on the on-chain protocol list. What led them to compete for users from the FOMO platform? What magic does the FOMO platform possess to become a formidable business competitor that makes Pump.fun nervous? Odaily Planet Daily will analyze the undercurrents and massive changes in the current overseas Meme market through this "gossip."

FOMO Has Become the Primary Meme Trading Platform for Users

FOMO is a multi-chain Meme trading platform, with a business and services similar to GMGN. The platform was launched in May 2025 and has been in operation for just over a year. However, according to RootData, FOMO has already completed three funding rounds, with a total funding amount of $94 million and a valuation exceeding $550 million.

FOMO mainly serves the overseas Meme community, with a focus on promoting mobile trading. Most users in the Chinese community may not have even heard of FOMO. What's even more surprising is that this platform, which you may have never heard of or used, has generated more revenue in the past 30 days than Uniswap and Phantom. Its Trading Bot market share has surpassed GMGN, making it the market leader.

According to DeFiLama data, FOMO generated $8.17 million in revenue in the past 30 days. Although still lagging behind GMGN and Axiom, it has already surpassed Phantom, Uniswap, and the mainstream Launchpads (Flap and Pons) on Robinhood.

Additionally, according to Dune data, as of the time of writing, the total fees on the FOMO platform have reached $30.39 million. As shown in the graph below, looking at the daily fees, the FOMO platform has experienced rapid growth since July, with daily fees averaging over $200,000. Earlier, the average daily fee was only $10. As of the time of writing, the FOMO platform set a new daily fee record on August 6th, reaching $556,000.

In August, the FOMO platform has continued its high growth trajectory. As of August 8th, the FOMO platform has captured a 43% market share in Trading Bots, surpassing GMGN to become the market leader, a position GMGN has held for a long time.

How significant is FOMO's current influence? A recent incident provides a clear example. On August 4th, the Solana Meme coin CATE experienced a flash crash of 65% in one minute, plummeting from a market cap of over $80 million to about $20 million. The community attributed this to two main reasons: first, CATE's X account was frozen, and second, FOMO suffered downtime, causing users to be unable to trade during the outage. Of course, this event has sparked much controversy, and interested readers can delve into further reading on their own.

Regardless of the truth, this incident alone is enough to illustrate the current influence of the FOMO platform in the meme ecosystem. So, from a product perspective, what makes FOMO stand out among its many competitors?

The answer lies in FOMO's product design. While FOMO offers core services similar to most meme trading platforms, its slogan is "the only social-first trading app." This is reflected in the product through the introduction of a Leaderboard and a feed providing real-time alerts on top traders.

FOMO Platform's LEADERBOARD and FEED

The meme market inherently worships the "money-first" strong, where anyone earning enough can be called "smart money" and gather a large following of fans and copycat accounts. The FOMO platform capitalizes on this characteristic by creating "gods," artificially elevating some high-profit users through pages like the Leaderboard to help them gain influence. FOMO team member @villagebythexyz stated on X platform on August 9 that, compared to previous cycles, anyone with any level of influence in the cryptocurrency space must now be an outstanding trader, emphasizing that "it is trading that shapes your fans, not fans shaping your trades."

This model has been hugely successful. For example, the Solana meme coin CATE saw a massive surge not due to its narrative allure but through the traffic and overt support of a figure known as "Little Ansem" Poorgoat. Poorgoat is a Hall of FOMO Famer (recognized by FOMO official for achieving substantial profits on FOMO) member. Therefore, with the adoration of fans, even if CATE lacks narrative appeal, it can still create a "myth."

Pump.fun also recognized the enormous growth potential of this model for the platform. Therefore, on August 7, Pump.fun APP announced a social feature upgrade, replicating FOMO's social functions. Now, upon entering Pump.fun's homepage, instead of an overwhelming feed of new meme coin information, users see a feed of meme traders/KOLs and operational monitoring alerts.

Pump.fun Homepage

The founder of Pump.fun, alon, has recently been actively posting to welcome more overseas Meme traders/KOLs to join the Pump.fun app. In order to attract more well-known overseas Meme traders to the Pump.fun platform, Pump.fun has even begun to explore the corners of FOMO, and has required Meme traders to sign an "exclusive agreement".

Imran, co-founder of Alliance, stated on Platform X that the competition between Pump and FOMO could become a key driver for bringing on-chain finance into the mainstream market. The competition between the two platforms will drive on-chain finance from its current niche in Crypto Twitter to consumer-oriented products for the general public.

However, fundamentally, Pump.fun's competitive business behavior also reflects that the overseas Meme market has entered the "Internet celebrity marketing model," where the market is dominated by whoever signs the most KOLs with strong promotional abilities.

Overseas Meme Market Shifts to Internet Celebrity Marketing Model

From the rise of FOMO to Pump.fun's cornering tactics, we can see that the overseas Meme market is undergoing a significant transformation: the core of market competition is no longer around issuance tools, transaction speed, or on-chain liquidity, but rather the competition revolves around the "attention resource entity".

As the early Meme coin market's reliance on that cultural consensus and celebrity coin narrative begins to fail, the market has shifted its focus from the Meme coin itself to the individuals trading the Meme coin, and FOMO's rapid growth logic is based on this shift in market gameplay. In this model, traders have replaced Meme coins as the new content entity, and platforms have packaged the originally decentralized on-chain trading activity into a content stream similar to entertainment consumption through rankings, trading dynamics, and copy trading mechanisms, with people becoming the new consensus medium.

For many retail investors who lack professional analysis capabilities, following a trader who has previously made millions of dollars in profit is obviously simpler than researching a newly born, unproven Meme project.

However, this trend also indicates that the Meme market is entering a more insular stage. When trading volume and market attention are focused on a few top traders, platform competition naturally shifts from acquiring users to competing for the "super nodes" who can bring in users, namely the Meme influencers.

This is very similar to the early battles among domestic short video live streaming platforms. Back then, platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, Huya, and Douyu competed for top anchors through high signing fees, essentially vying for attention. The difference is that the competition for top anchors in the short video live streaming industry took place in a rapidly expanding emerging market where the user base and commercial value were still growing, ultimately driving the live streaming industry towards maturity.

Now, the Meme market is experiencing a similar competitive pattern, reflecting a completely different signal.

When platforms start competing for the same group of "trading celebrities," the winner may achieve short-term growth, but it also means that the entire Meme track is losing the vitality originally formed by community culture and organic dissemination. This is the biggest risk for Memes.