Pump.fun suspends livestream feature amid backlash

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The Solana memecoin launchpad pump.fun faced backlash over the weekend after a number of violent and unsavory livestreams on the platform started making the rounds on social media. By Monday afternoon, its livestream feature had been temporarily deactivated. 

The offending streams ranged from token launchers threatening to commit violent acts unless a coin’s price goes up to racist or disgusting content meant to create viral shock value and juice the token’s price. This all happened as pump.fun booked staggering $14.3 million in revenue on Saturday, according to a pump.fun dashboard, nearly tripling its previous high. 

Pump.fun is no stranger to edgy content. The site has drawn comparisons to the anonymous forum site 4chan for its often-unhinged content and lax approach to moderation. Before this current wave of disturbing livestreams, pump.fun had a large number of racially insensitive or pornographic tokens, none of which are subject to content moderation.

But as disturbing livestreams went viral on X, pump.fun’s anonymous founder alon wrote that the platform would work to protect users from seeing “repulsive/dangerous content.” In a separate thread, alon said pump had taken down a stream of a user threatening to shoot their dog unless a token’s market capitalization increased, noting that the platform has now taken down “hundreds of streams.”

A little after 2:00 p.m., pump.fun disabled livestreams on the platform altogether. In a blog post shortly after, pump.fun cited “unprecedented growth” as the key challenge to content moderation before adding that livestreams would be paused “for an indefinite time period.”

This feels like an inflection point for a platform that has separated itself as the most viral application on Solana, booking nearly $250 million in revenue since launching. Largely on the back of memecoin activity emanating from pump.fun, Solana has seen record demand for its blockspace, which in turn has lined the pockets of the validators who run the blockchain’s software.

Leaders in the Solana world largely cast memecoins either as a stress test for the network or as an emerging, if currently unserious, financial use case for memes. Even among those who oppose crypto being used for what is essentially gambling, it’s frowned upon to tell users or developers what they should or shouldn’t do with blockchain technology. 

Multiple crypto posters shrugged off the pump.fun criticism, pointing out that every large social tech platform has had its warts with content moderation. 

But as Solana and crypto hopes for a shift to the mainstream, some are calling for a reckoning with memecoins’ downsides.

“Pump Fun is going to become a massive reputational stain on the crypto industry, on par with FTX,” Chainlink community liaison Zach Rynes wrote on X. Tech lawyer Preston Byrne also pointed out that the platform “does a lot very incorrectly from a social media law” perspective.

Up until now, pump.fun’s playbook has largely been to make light of criticism through trolling. With livestreams disabled, it appears this particular round of backlash hit home. It remains to be seen whether this will make any difference for traders in the so-called memecoin trenches.

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