Pump.fun restricts access for UK users

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The team behind the memecoin launchpad pump.fun began restricting UK users this morning.

The move came days after the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority tagged pump.fun as unauthorized. Most firms need the regulator’s approval to do finance-related business in the country. It’s apparently the platform’s first public restriction, despite facing past criticism for its fast-and-loose approach to moderation.

Notably, pump.fun — which allows users to launch Solana-based tokens for around $2 — took down its livestreaming feature last week after a number of violent and disturbing streams went viral.

The site’s UK block doesn’t represent a ban per se, Shardspace co-founder Avaunt said in the Lightspeed Telegram chat. Rather, pump.fun likely never properly registered and complied with the UK’s crypto guidelines, and the regulator is just now holding it accountable.

Pump.fun has some apparent links to the UK. When the then-nascent platform was exploited by former contractor Jarett Dunn in May, he was arrested in London. Dunn, a notorious online troll, did make a seemingly-serious claim that pump.fun is linked to a UK-based entity called Baton Corporation. 

“Pump is not legally based in the UK,” the platform’s pseudonymous founder alon told me in a text, but they declined to elaborate further.

Zooming out for a second though, it’s somewhat surprising a pump.fun restriction took this long in the first place. The UK is no crypto libertarian paradise — for example, prediction market favorite Polymarket is already unavailable there. The UK’s financial regulator claims to have taken down “over 900 scam crypto websites and over 50 apps” since October 2023.

“Thought IP [address] restrictions were pretty common in this industry lol not quite sure why [everyone is] freaking out,” Tom, anonymous contributor to Raydium, told me in a text.

Pump.fun has been the most popular app on Solana — and at times in all of crypto — for much of this year. With that popularity will inevitably come scrutiny, especially when users are beheading chickens on livestream in hopes of making a token’s price go up. If Gary Gensler’s SEC tenure were to continue past this year, it’s hard to imagine the SEC wouldn’t have taken some sort of action against pump.fun, too.

How the fallout from pump.fun’s livestream snafu settles will be something to watch. Perhaps regulators will be able to do what criticism or backlash never could — slow down a startup that has already generated $283 million in revenue in its first year of existence.

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