Howdy!

Solana land got pump.fun’s X page back, but in exchange it had to watch JPMorgan launch its JPMD pilot on Base. Kind of a raw deal.

Today, we’ve got potential acquisition targets for pump.fun, an interesting DEX volume stat, and alon’s one-day X suspension:

4 companies pump.fun could look at acquiring

With pump.fun set to reportedly raise $1 billion via a token sale, it’s fair to assume the memecoin launchpad will at least be open to exploring acquisitions as a way of putting its fresh capital to work. Based on my own guesswork and a few conversations with industry watchers, here are four businesses I think could make sense for a pump.fun acquisition: 

1. BullX

Many memecoin traders don’t actually trade through pump.fun’s frontend, opting for the sniping and copy trading features offered by trading bots — many of which run on Telegram.

These bots collect fees on trading volume, which can end up being quite lucrative. Blockworks Research estimated the gross annual revenue for Solana trading bots to have been between $500 million to $1 billion in 2024. 

Pump.fun has so far been fine to coexist, but as the speculative trading game grows more crowded — and particularly with the entry of more put-together competitors like Axiom — pump will need to scheme out how it can win back some of those trading volumes. 

BullX, a popular Solana Telegram bot that has drawn allegations of founder disinvolvement, could be a good takeover target.

2. DEX Screener

On top of sniping, another category where pump.fun loses users is in token discovery. Rather than trying to find their next buy through pump’s somewhat limited and clunky interface, traders have historically turned to platforms like DEX Screener that come with more fine-tuned data and tracking features for traders. 

A major way DEX Screener makes money is by charging memecoin projects for a more souped-up page on the platform, and DeFiLlama counts it as having made over $100 million in revenue over the past year and change. 

Pump.fun has already launched an “advanced” tab that offers DEX Screener-like features, but if it finds DEX Screener users too sticky to win over, it could make sense to just combine the two. It wouldn’t be the first time one went after the other’s users: DEX Screener released a memecoin launchpad called Moonshot that, well, hasn’t been much of a moonshot. 

3. Titan

The majority of onchain Solana activity comes from memecoin trading and swaps between SOL and stablecoins, as Blockworks Research’s Carlos Gonzalez Campo has pointed out. Pump.fun is doing pretty well on the memecoin side of things, but likely few users are swapping USDC for SOL on pump.fun’s AMM. 

Much of that volume goes to Jupiter, a DEX aggregator that algorithmically finds the best route for trades to travel to achieve the best possible price. It’s a valuable product, and even if a swap aggregator collects minimal fees, it could be a loss leader to draw users who may then convert to customers of more revenue-generating products. 

One candidate here could be Titan, a newer Solana DEX aggregator that claims its swaps outperform Jupiter most of the time.

4. Cube Exchange

The best business in crypto is arguably still just running an exchange. If pump.fun had its own centralized exchange, it could access a lot more liquidity and likely diversify out from memecoins into other fields like perpetual futures, or even try to capture trading volume on new asset classes.

Pump.fun memes could also get expedited listings on the exchange, maintaining the platform’s edge against the likes of Coinbase and Binance, which are sometimes slower to list popular new memecoins. Pump could use the distribution from the exchange to drive interest in things like pump.fun livestreams. 

Compared to some other targets, acquiring an exchange is an expensive proposition. Cube makes sense because its CEO is Solana-native, having previously worked at the foundation, and the exchange’s volume doesn’t tend to run as high as some competitors. 

Backpack acquired FTX EU for $32.7 million earlier this year. Cube probably wouldn’t be that cheap, but pump is likely to have lots of cash.

— Jack Kubinec

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It’s all memes and SOL-USD:

This Blockworks Research data shows how a large majority of Solana DEX volume consists of memecoins and SOL-USD swaps. 

Pump.fun owns the former category, and Jupiter owns much of the latter. Surprise surprise: They’ve been two of the five highest fee-generating protocols on Solana over the past year.

— Jack Kubinec

On Monday, X suspended the accounts belonging to @pumpdotfun and its founder, Alon, without explanation.

CT sleuths leaned heavily into speculation, pondering whether it resulted from the founder’s arrest, service of process, platform abuse reports or literally none of those things (Spoiler alert: This appears to be the correct answer).

While degen sentiment split firmly between “burn the witch” and “free my boy,” the site itself kept chugging along like nothing had happened. In fact, pump.fun’s AMM volume soared from $271m to $413m in 24 hours, with bonding curve trades jumping $37m, according to Blockworks Research.

As of this morning, X has restored both accounts to working order, though the reasons for the takedown remain unknown at time of publication. If we had to take a guess, misuse of X’s API or rapid automated activity feel like the most plausible culprit.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from JR Reed, partner at Multicoin Capital: