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Howdy!

I’m writing from Salt Lake City, where I just touched down for Permissionless! 

Expect some slightly shorter newsletters this week while I deal with the masses of adoring Lightspeed fans asking for pictures and autographs. And if you’re having conference FOMO, follow along with me on X (@whosknave) for updates.

Pump.fun revenue is back near record highs

Trendy new apps don’t tend to last long in crypto — except, apparently, for pump.fun.

After a tame September, memecoins have returned to prominence in recent days, with the Solana-based launchpad seemingly leading the way.

The app, which seemed past its heyday just weeks ago, has recorded 12 straight days of at least $900,000 in revenue, according to a Dune dashboard. The last time it pulled that off was *checks notes* never. MOODENG, a pump.fun token based on a viral baby hippo from a zoo in Thailand, seemingly kicked off the recent memecoin rally, in which traders seem to be skipping out on traditional memes to trade pump.fun coins.

Kaito AI, which uses artificial intelligence to analyze online sentiment, said Monday that memecoin mindshare is now at a yearly high. 

A majority of the ten largest memecoins are down on the week, according to Coingecko, while pump.fun had its most consistent week and a half of revenue yet — indicating that traders are passing up the likes of dogecoin and pepe in favor of pump.fun’s cute animal pictures du jour.

Crypto’s online hype machine has already kicked in. Murad Mahmudov, a longtime crypto public figure who’s shifted from bitcoin maximalism to memecoins, went viral for a podcast segment explaining why memecoins will “Outperform Everything” in 2025. Su Zhu, most famously the co-founder of collapsed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, weighed in that “[i]nstitutional allocation to memecoins is likely to be the story of q4 2024.” Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said he sold his MOODENG allocation and donated the proceeds to support anti-airborne disease technology.

And — stop me if you’ve heard this before — a rapper who’s a few years past her last top hit released a pump.fun memecoin. 

Not everyone was feeling quite so upbeat. 

“If you are finally joining the influencers that missed out and are just now joining memes in Q4, congrats, you are exit liquidity for everyone who was early,” wrote based16z, a popular crypto poster.

For anyone who’s been following over the past six months, it feels like crypto is stuck in something of a pump.fun Groundhog Day. The meme market pumps, similar players play similar roles in the online drama, and some industry watchers — myself being one of them — fall into believing that the pump.fun top is finally in.

But enough time has passed for crypto to wise up. Bet against pump.fun, which has already booked over $120 million in revenue roughly ten months after launching, at your own peril.

— Jack Kubinec

Permissionless has the galaxy brain content you read the Lightspeed newsletter for, but IRL. 

Catch the brightest minds in the Solana ecosystem as they discuss the challenges and future of blockbuilding in Solana.

Here’s something interesting that seems to happen when memes are hot:

When memecoins were seeing lots of activity over the summer and in recent days, Solana’s economic activity came proportionately more from Jito tips and priority fees and less from vote fees and base fees. 

Vote fees are paid by validators for performing network transactions to help Solana reach consensus. Because Solana validators are always running, these fees seem to stay relatively constant over time. Tips and priority fees, on the other hand, are dependent on demand. When more accounts clamor to have transactions processed, people will be willing to pay more to get their transaction into blocks.

A message from David Lu, core contributor to Drift: