Author: Arndxt, crypto researcher; Translated by: 0xjs@Golden Finance

Frankly, what I saw disturbed me.

pump.fun first ushered in the memecoin era on Solana and led the entire web3 ecosystem.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Let me break down Pump's fun (and ugly) achievements.

No doubt pump.fun made $100 million in revenue in just 6 months, but it was at the expense of losers because, as we all know, it’s a zero-sum game.

Although they have created 2 million memecoins on Solana, 99.99% of the issued memecoins have failed, which is obvious because where does the huge liquidity come from to support these memecoins?

Since this is a zero-sum game, the 1% winners could take everything, with the project founders/memecoin developers being the only winners, while the other 99% of users lose money.

If we want this space to mature and grow further, we have to move beyond the current mindset that people have, which they hailed as “driving meaningful web3 adoption.”

From what I have seen, this is far from adoption and is likely to be exploited by project insiders and a few people.

pump.fun is essentially a casino that wins no matter how the memecoin price moves. They are making a killing while almost everyone else is losing money.

Sure, they’re creating a lot of activity on Solana, but it’s coming at the expense of users.

I know crypto and web3 are still evolving, but if this is what success looks like, I think we have lost our way.

All in all, I’m pretty confident that this is a step towards mass adoption and a successful business (gambling) model, but it still validates the immaturity of many users.

I think there are a lot of things we can learn from this. So build strategies around these experiences.