Buybacks and AI features can't mask the decline: Pump.fun is trapped in the meme cycle.

Author: Frank, PANews

Pump.fun, as the "meme minting factory" of the Solana ecosystem, has accumulated astonishing revenue and wealth. However, the price of its platform token, PUMP, has struggled under continuous selling pressure. To reverse this decline, Pump.fun is attempting a two-pronged approach: a strong token buyback and the experimental introduction of a new AI agent feature called "Mayhem Mode."

Faced with a complex market environment and internal challenges, can this meme behemoth truly regain its former glory?

Data shows a significant decline, but remains relatively resilient compared to the industry average.

To understand Pump.fun's predicament, one must examine its complex data.

As of November 14th, Pump.fun's average daily revenue remained above $1 million, ranking among the top five protocols. However, this represents a significant decline compared to the $4 million daily revenue seen at the beginning of the year. Meanwhile, the number of new tokens issued daily on Pump.fun has decreased from a peak of 70,000 to less than 20,000. The number of daily active wallets has also decreased, although it has remained above 100,000 for the past three months, indicating a relatively minor decline. The token graduation rate has dropped significantly; since February of this year, the graduation rate for tokens on Pump.fun has consistently been below 1%, even falling to 0.58% in September. This reflects the decreasing success rate of meme trading. However, a large part of this decline is due to the overall industry downturn. Compared to its peers, Pump.fun's market share has actually increased. For example, on November 12th, Pump.fun issued 14,800 tokens on Solana's meme launch platform, accounting for approximately 93.4%. Previously, during the meme launch platform wars, its share had dropped as low as 16.8%. Looking at the overall performance, Pump.fun's data has indeed declined significantly compared to its peak, but it appears more resilient compared to its competitors. "Buybacks" and "Pullbacks": The Ineffective Token Business Strategy Faced with slowing platform growth and a continued decline in the price of the PUMP token, the Pump.fun team attempted to revitalize the market through buybacks using its "money power" and the introduction of "Mayhem Mode." Since launching its token PUMP in July, Pump.fun has used approximately 98% of its platform revenue to buy back over $173.7 million worth of PUMP tokens, equivalent to 11.19% of the total circulating supply. This buyback effort ranks second among all buyback protocols, with daily buyback volume second only to Hyperliquid. However, PUMP's price performance and the magnitude of the buybacks seem disproportionate. The token's performance has plummeted from its September high, falling to a low of $0.0015, a drop of over 83%. The current pullback is approximately 60%, while Bitcoin's maximum pullback during the same period was approximately 23%, and HYPE's was approximately 40%. With the "money power" failing, the team attempted to create a new narrative through product innovation. On November 12th, the platform launched an experimental "Chaos Mode." This feature aims to automatically participate in the trading of new tokens by introducing AI agents. According to the documentation, these AI agents would mint an additional 1 billion tokens for selected tokens (doubling the total supply to 2 billion), then conduct "random trading" within 24 hours to increase early liquidity, and finally burn any unsold tokens. However, this highly anticipated update encountered "chaos" upon launch. Community feedback indicated the new feature was unusable, with numerous bugs appearing, including "minting excessive token supply," "draining creator funds," and "locking user funds." Meme KOL Pepe Boost bluntly stated, "In actual observation, there wasn't much more trading volume than regular tokens," and "I thought there would be a big one, but it's actually just some experimental AI playing around on Pump." The market sell-off is in the "Meme track," not Pump.fun. Why can't the daily buybacks of millions of dollars support the price? The highly anticipated new feature has become a laughing stock. The fundamental reason for the market's lack of acceptance may not lie with Pump.fun alone, but with a broader narrative, structural flaws, and the power of cycles. First, the market is driven by an unavoidable trend. Recently, the market correction has intensified, with almost all tokens declining. In this environment, buybacks can only "slow down the decline" rather than "reverse the trend." As mentioned earlier, Hyperliquid has a similarly robust revenue and buyback mechanism, but its token also experienced a significant 40% correction. This proves that in a bear market, relying solely on protocol revenue buybacks cannot counteract macro-level selling pressure. Second, there is a persistent skepticism in the market: Pump.fun's high revenue and trading volume are a huge "bubble," meaning they are generated by high-frequency trading bots rather than from real users. Once this bubble bursts, the corresponding price will be difficult to sustain. PANews conducted a survey specifically on this issue, randomly selecting several hundred recent transactions from 10 tokens that had not yet graduated for behavioral analysis. They found that bot trading volume currently accounts for approximately 54.7% of these tokens' trading volume, with each bot contributing an average of 22 transactions per token, compared to only 1.8 transactions from real users. In terms of transaction value contribution, each bot contributed $68 in transaction value per transaction, with bots contributing approximately 45.6% of the total transaction value. However, this percentage is actually lower than previous surveys. Therefore, from this perspective, the "bot bubble" is a long-standing structural problem for Pump.fun, but it has not worsened recently and should not be considered a major factor in the token's decline. Third, after excluding macroeconomic and robotic factors, the core reason might not be that Pump.fun is failing, but rather that the Meme ecosystem itself is failing. The fundamental reason for the market's lack of support is that investors have lost confidence in the "Meme coin" sector as a whole. Pump.fun, as the infrastructure of this sector, reflects future expectations for the entire sector. Currently, these expectations are pessimistic. This is evident in the performance of the Solana ecosystem, where activity is shrinking. Data shows that the total number of active wallets on Solana recently hit a 12-month low. As the main battleground for Meme tokens, Solana's "fuel" is running out. It's not just Pump.fun; the data from other Meme launch platforms is even more dismal. LetsBonk.fun, which once threatened Pump.fun's position in July, saw its activity rapidly "collapse" after August, and currently only about 200 new tokens are issued daily. In this industry-wide downturn, Pump.fun is actually the "most resilient one." Therefore, we can seemingly conclude that the decline in PUMP tokens is not a sell-off of Pump.fun, but rather a sell-off of the entire Meme token market. Pump.fun was simply the most luxurious first-class cabin on the sinking Titanic.