Pump.fun offers top traders an exclusive monthly salary of 30,000 USD; the platform has begun hiring under media company logic.

Written by: @ponyo_fp, Four Pillars

Translated by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News

Key Points

Trading has turned into a spectator business. In applications like fomo, every single trade is publicly broadcasted with its profit and loss. The daily active traders on fomo rose from 1,100 to over 90,000 within a year.

The platform now pays traders in a way that is akin to how media companies pay talent. Pump.fun has shared 483 million USD with creators and offered top traders a monthly salary of 30,000 USD, with the requirement to trade exclusively on their platform.

In August, both applications launched the "family/team" feature, aggregating multiple members' positions into a single scoreboard. This is an early sign: fans are organizing into trading groups based on trading records, rather than follower counts.

Public profit and loss can tell you who is winning but cannot tell you how much you can make by following. Among 292,531 fomo wallets, only 6% made a profit over a 90-day period, with a median loss of 120 USD; most of the profits in top accounts are still unrealized gains.

On September 6, a trader posted a recruitment message. He was looking for members for his team. This is a new feature in the pump.fun app that allows several traders' positions to be aggregated under one name and one scoreboard. New members would join the family and "dig trenches" together in a Telegram voice room. He does not care about follower count, only whether you can prove your trading skills. The best evidence, he says, is a pump.fun account, which allows him to review transaction records. At that time, his team had only 3 members, with an unrealized position of 300,790 USD, and a daily gain of 11%. The target is to scale it above 1 million USD.

A colleague forwarded this post to me and raised the real question this article seeks to address: is this still trading, or has it become something else? First, I should clarify that I also trade on the mobile versions of fomo and pump.fun, and I enjoy it quite a bit, which may affect my subsequent judgments.

Trading is Content

Once a trade is public, it becomes content; content attracts viewers; viewers then spur the next trade. What keeps this cycle going is the mobile phone—this condition did not exist during the last meme frenzy. In January 2025, trading still occurs via Telegram bots or browser terminals, and bragging is done on X. This summer, both have been incorporated into the same application.

The mobile versions of fomo and pump.fun place the information stream and order button on the same screen. On the fastest-growing fomo, every trade is broadcasted publicly with its profit and loss. Each account has daily, weekly, monthly, and overall leaderboards. Followers are no longer just "people who like your opinions," but "those who have seen your trades and hope the next one is pushed to their phones."

The growth speed is rapid. Only on Solana, the daily active traders on fomo averaged 1,100 a year ago, and this August have surpassed 90,000—without even counting Robinhood Chain, which now processes most of its transaction volume. On August 21, it ranked third among finance apps for iPhone in the U.S., exceeding Cash App. The competing platform, pump.fun, has paid 483 million USD to token creators since it started sharing revenue in May last year, keeping about 653 million USD for itself. For every 1 USD the platform earns, talent takes 74 cents.

Traders as New Influencers

If trading is content, the platform is a media company. Media companies need to compete for talent. In August, a contract from pump.fun for top traders leaked: a signing bonus of 20,000 USD, a monthly salary of 30,000 USD, a minimum trading volume requirement, at least 4 public calls per month, and a stipulation to disable fomo accounts and declare the use of only one wallet.

In the same month, pump.fun began paying callers who could drive trades. The daily prize pool started at 15,000 USD, growing to 300,000 USD within two weeks, peaking at 1 million USD in a single day on September 1. On the day it reached 1 million USD, the buyback and call rewards consumed all of the platform's revenue for that day. Fomo splits a quarter of the fees from recommended users with the referrer. Pons gives 70% of each transaction fee to token creators.

Source: X (@CLR_fomo)

When product differentiation fails, a common method to seize market share is to lower prices. A more subtle form of price reduction in the market is to offer less security. Attention is also a type of commodity. Tokens, chains, leaderboards—what apps can do is limited to bidding. Whoever bids the highest for traffic wins.

People are familiar with the form of influencer economics, and it’s the same here. Among the 2.23 million addresses that received creator shares on pump.fun, 1.67 million have lifetime earnings of less than 10 USD; about 9,000 exceed 10,000 USD. This reflects the distribution seen on YouTube as well as that of all media where "audiences pay talent through the platform." The difference is that here, the audience is also betting against the talent.

Trading Together

The appearance of Clans indicates that the information flow has begun to take shape as a list. Fomo launched Clans on August 10, ranking members by total profit over a week and a month. It started with 50, and after three weeks reached 150. Pump.fun's version is called Squads, discovered 11 days after fomo's launch. Soon, third parties began selling keys to private family chat rooms, and internal conversations among families also became assets.

Meme trading has gone through three rounds, each with a different game.

The first round, the launchpad era, was like roulette: anyone could launch, and no one could see clearly; luck determined most outcomes.

The second round, dubbed "the cabal era" by traders, resembled poker: chips were folded into bundled wallets before launch, hiding who held the goods.

The current round is more like backgammon. Everything on the board is visible. You can see what positions top players hold, when they opened, and when they exited.

Clan did not remove that hidden card; it added a new one. You still cannot see what agreements those three people in the voice room made before executing their trades.

Vampire Wars

A well-organized group, holding visible chips, has already demonstrated what it can do over the past two weekends on Robinhood Chain. Robinhood issued about 190 tokenized versions of stocks, minted by an authorized participant, and only during trading hours. On Sunday, August 30, a meme coin paired with tokenized HIMS drained 81% of the 15,227 HIMS tokens, bringing the price down to 132.64 USD on a transaction volume of 39,000 USD, while that stock closed at 28.84 USD on Friday. When the minter returned on Monday, the premium disappeared within an hour. That week, the actual stock fell by 6%, with no short sellers being squeezed. The CEO of the company that got squeezed is now following this coin's account.

Then there’s AMC. A week earlier, a coin called CINEMA had already played the same trick on tokenized AMC, which went largely unnoticed. On the night of September 3, AMC's CEO posted that Robinhood's tokens were a "pseudo market" and demanded an "immediate halt." A few minutes past midnight, a coin called A MEME COIN went live; 40 minutes after his second post, its market cap reached 151 million USD. By 8 AM, it had acquired 547,000 of the 1.1 million tokenized AMC in its pool. The original pool had only 30,000 tokens left. The original pool is now worth about 1 million USD. Robinhood's general counsel replied, "Send the lawyers over, we will educate them." The CEO then asked, "What's there to worry about?" On January 28, 2021, AMC shareholders begged Robinhood to let them buy. On September 4, 2026, AMC's CEO begged Robinhood to let them stop; Robinhood refused. Sound familiar?

What is the Winning Rate?

Anyone who has stood at a betting window knows that popularity itself has no information value because everyone can see it. What matters is whether the odds are fair. Public profit and loss expose the popular trades clearly: the app itself, the top twenty accounts displaying a total profit of 82 million dollars, and each clan leader. What it does not disclose is the trade faced by newcomers.

Midcurver77’s public Dune query calculated this instance. As of mid-August, among the 292,531 wallets that engaged in fomo Solana routed trading over 90 days, 6.16% were profitable; of those profitable, 88% made less than 100 USD. The median wallet showed a loss of 120 USD. Those wallets collectively lost 1.26 billion USD. He compared it to a casino with about a 1% house edge—where about 37% of players can gain in a similar period. Meanwhile, the top figure of 82 million USD largely consists of unrealized gains from a small number of tokens in thin pools.

A few days ago, I casually mentioned that when top traders post an argument, is it close to what used to be listed on CEX? Half-jokingly. Someone replied with a circulating list that ranks traders by "how much a post is worth at which exchange," with Binance spot at the very top and second-tier Asian exchanges at the bottom.

This list is absurd; both its creators and circulators do not truly believe that a single post equates to being listed. But the point is not here. The point is: the market has begun to look at traders in the same way it used to look at exchanges—who's attention can drive prices.

Source: X (@ponyo_fp)

Looking Ahead

My judgment is as follows:

Trading has become a form of entertainment and content.

The platform is now a media company. They are competing for talent through contracts, calling reward pools, and fee sharing. Attention is a commodity, and bids will only go in one direction.

The odds for followers are not good; clans do not change this fact. Clans will only make the winning side more organized and the losing side larger.

The winning vampire game is the side that first absorbs the circulating supply; when the circulating supply is absorbed, it is a squeeze. A squeeze ends when the circulating supply grows again.

If you join a team, first clarify which round of the three-game series you are playing in, and whether you are the one holding the dice.

Finally, I leave the last words to Charlie Munger, as the betting window is the most appropriate point of closure. He referred to the racetrack as the purest market: everyone's money goes into the same pool, the track takes about 17% off the top, and each horse's odds are determined by the portion of the pool staked on it. Whoever runs the fastest is visible to all. But by the time you see it, others see it too, and the money staked drives the payout down to almost nothing. Therefore, the average bettor loses due to the track's cut, with the more astute losing a bit less. The few who can win, he said, "bet very little." They wait for the crowd to misprice a horse before placing heavy bets.