In one of the the internet stranger is around, a unicorn with human breastsa cheetah smokingand the animated Elon Musk in a traditional robe sits cheek-by-jowl-the cast of a bad trip. A Word Art banner topped the page, a floating anachronism. Icons flash, vibrate, bounce, and in other ways evade the pursuing eye. Barely legible messages appear in green, red and yellow, then disappear.

Yet beneath this belch of Internet weirdness and low-fi web design lies one of fastest growing cryptocurrency businesses since: Pump. Entertainmenta platform for launching memecoinsa type of crypto coin whose value rises and falls according to the popularity of the memes it refers to.

The platform went live in January 2024. In the 12 months since, it has been reported by third parties that bring more than $350 million in revenue through a 1 percent cut in trades.

Pump.Fun is the brainchild of three entrepreneurs in their early twenties: Noah Tweedale, Alon Cohen, and Dylan Kerler. The three started out as memecoin traders themselves, but grew tired of repeatedly falling victim to rug-pulling—a type of scam where a coin issuer steals funds, leaving investors on the loose. of worthless tokens.

“Buying memecoins is an unsafe thing to do… Everything is designed to siphon off people’s money,” Tweedale told WIRED in an interview last year. “The idea of ​​Pump is to create something where everyone is on the same playing field.”

The three cofounders of Pump.Fun, who met in England, tried to keep their identities a secret—Tweedale and Cohen continued to go public through their respective online pseudonyms, Sapijiju and A1on , while Kerler has less public association with Pump.Fun. But their names came out last year in corporate documents tied to the operation.

Tweedale agreed to meet with WIRED, but only on the condition that the location and details of his appearance remain undisclosed. When we met, he looked sincere but a little awkward—and he talked a mile a minute. He declined to answer questions about where Pump.Fun’s operations are based or how many people it employs.

The secrecy is partly a reflection of an attitude common in the cryptosphere that the right to privacy is sacrosanct, Tweedale said. But it’s also about “personal security and safety,” he said. In theory, the amount of crypto going through Pump.Fun wallets would make the team a target extortionists.

The goal is for builders to be more public-facing in the future, Tweedale said. But in the meantime, there is the matter of how to reinvest the money generated by Pump.Fun to harden and expand the platform in the face of increased scrutiny and inevitable pains. “We are not here to make a quick buck, shut down the website, and run away. We want to build something that lasts,” Tweedale said.

The long-term vision, he says, is to transform Pump.Fun from a one-dimensional memecoin launchpad into a competitor to the largest social platform, but where the lion’s share of those we flow to users and creators. “Think of Instagram or TikTok, where everyone is investing,” Tweedale said. “The Pump UI – everything we have – is the earliest possible version of what you can imagine we want to do.”

Before Pump.Fun, quite a bit some memecoins have come to the market; only Dogecointhe original memecoin, and a few others—like Shiba Inu, Pepeand Bonk—achieved any kind of prominence. The complexity of developing a memecoin and the cost of supplying the liquidity needed to make it readily marketable limited the amount released.