The Fall of Pump.fun: A Dirge of Financial Nihilism

A crazy speculative feast is unfolding on the Solana chain in just one year.

When you open the Pump.fun page, you will see a dense array of meme coins being born and dying, with wealth soaring and plummeting. A token can go from inception to zero in just a few hours; it is more brutal and even more candid than a casino.

Pump.fun, a meme coin trading platform that rapidly rose in mid-2023, is completely different from the previous "OG meme" trends like $DOGE and $PEPE. Here, there is no need for a document or community, no need to hype or tell stories; issuing tokens, grabbing liquidity, pumping, and dumping all happen in one go. Creation and destruction happen in an instant.

Some call it the ultimate nihilism of finance, a place without a future, reality, or meaning, only the frenzy of the present.

I. The Miracle of Wealth Creation Under "Nihilism"

Nihilism, in a philosophical sense, refers to the idea that the world has no real value or meaning.

At Pump.fun, this philosophy is pushed to the extreme: tokens have no fundamentals, and white papers can even be randomly generated using ChatGPT. The process of issuing tokens is so simple that ordinary users can create their own tokens with just a few clicks and a few $SOL.

This is the "postmodern performance art" of finance: creating something from nothing, playing with nihilism, turning the word "value" into a joke.

In this completely free model, tens of thousands of tokens have emerged in just a few months, including meaningless symbols, memes, or simple letter combinations. But the madness is that, despite its absurdity, some people are willing to pay real money.

The founder stated in an interview, "I created a pure, unrestrained, free token issuance platform; I don't care how people use it. It's like an experiment."

Indeed, this experiment has attracted a large number of players, with a few making a fortune and the majority losing everything, forming a clear financial hierarchy.

II. Philosophical Reflection on the "Fast Food" Nature of Tokens

The speculative behavior typical of the meme coin market exhibits the following patterns:

| Stage | User Type | Profit Probability | |----------------|------------------------------------|------------------------| | Initial Stage | Token Creators (dev) and Early Participants | ✅ High | | Mid-term Boom | Retail Investors, Many Follower Participants | ❌ Low | | Price Retracement | Latecomers, Holders Who Don't Sell in Time | ❌❌ Very Low |

As Baudrillard pointed out in "The Consumer Society," modern society's understanding of value has turned into the consumption of symbols, and the essence of value itself has been dismantled.

At Pump.fun, this consumption of symbols has reached its peak:

• Tokens can rise a hundredfold within minutes and quickly drop to zero within hours.

• Numerous anonymous founders are indifferent to the existence of their tokens, and the community is almost nonexistent.

• Users flock in purely for speculative profits, akin to a game of hot potato.

This is the ultimate manifestation of financial nihilism: any asset can be currency; anything that can attract attention can have temporary value.

Someone joked on Twitter: "Pump.fun is the TikTok of the crypto world, fast consumption, instant gratification, and in the next second, you have nothing."

III. Who is Reaping the Dividends of This Nihilistic Carnival?

From an economic perspective, this carnival is not without its rules.

Observing the public opinion on Reddit, X (formerly Twitter), Telegram, etc.:

• Many retail investors complain about high loss rates, becoming liquidity for the devs;

• While there are some profit cases, they are generally concentrated among a few users with strong trading skills (scientists) or early investors (P players);

• Profitable users tend to share profit screenshots, while losers tend to remain silent, leading to an inflated appearance of profitable users.

Based on the above public sentiment analysis:

• The actual proportion of profitable users is far lower than the appearance on public social platforms;

• Profitable users are mainly a small number of professional users skilled in high-frequency arbitrage.

Through on-chain data analysis, a rough estimate of the profit and loss situation of Pump.fun participants has been compiled:

| User Category | Estimated Proportion | Profit Probability | |---------------------------------------|--------------------------|------------------------| | Token Creators (Token Deployers) | 1-2% | 🔥 High | | High-Frequency Arbitrage Bots (Scientists) | 5-8% | 📈 Medium-High | | Experienced On-Chain Speculators (P Players) | 5-10% | 📊 Medium | | Ordinary Retail Users (Chives) | Over 80% | 📉 Low to Very Low |

Most retail investors, having missed the entry opportunity, can only become the "chives" that are harvested. Founders or deploying bots can mint tokens at an extremely low cost (only a few SOL), occupying an absolute advantage and having a vast profit margin.

The founder of Pump.fun candidly stated, "I don't see a problem; this is a free market; no one forces you to buy or sell; the losers brought it upon themselves."

From a realistic perspective, this anarchic market is inevitably filled with predators and their prey.

IV. When "Nihilism" Meets "Greed"

In the big casino of Solana, the most primal desires of human nature are laid bare:

• FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) drives people to continuously buy worthless tokens.

• The greed of a hundredfold return intertwines with fear, constantly pushing the cycle of speculation.

Users are immersed in the delusion of "If others can earn, so can I," while ignoring the essence of financial markets: zero-sum games or even negative-sum games.

Even more absurdly, when a meaningless token launched on Pump.fun, its trading volume briefly surpassed that of other mainstream projects on Solana, even exceeding some centralized exchanges.

Pump.fun acts like a magic mirror, reflecting the essence of greed and luck within everyone.

V. A Tragic Song That Will Surely Fade Away

Philosopher Schopenhauer said, "Life is like a pendulum, swinging between pain and boredom."

At Pump.fun, the pendulum swings wildly between sudden wealth and bankruptcy.

In the short term, Pump.fun can continue to exist because human nature itself prefers gambling-style speculation. However, in the long term, this fast-food consumption of worthless tokens cannot last.

The essence of finance lies in value discovery and transmission. When everything is simplified into instant gratification and fast-food-style games, the core of the market will ultimately lose its support.

No matter how laissez-faire the founder of Pump.fun is, this carnival will eventually come to an end. At that time, participants will realize:

All bubbles will eventually burst; all revelry will ultimately fall silent.

VI. The Real Significance of Financial Nihilism

But Pump.fun may not be entirely negative; it is an extreme satire of the absurdities of modern finance. It vividly presents the flaws of human nature and the extreme manifestations of decentralized finance in an unregulated state.

Perhaps this is the meaning of Pump.fun's existence: to reveal the essence and dangers of "financial nihilism" in the most extreme and naked form, warning the future crypto financial world to focus more on real value creation rather than indulging in the madness of speculative bubbles.

Or, as the founder said, "What I created is meaningless, but precisely because it is meaningless, it is full of meaning."

Indeed, this is Pump.fun, the most ironic yet real tragic song under the nihilism of crypto finance.

Disclaimer: The views in this article are for discussion and reference only and do not constitute any investment advice. Investment should be approached with caution, rational entry into the market, and avoidance of blind speculation.