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Howdy! 

It turns out I’m nearly a year late to this, but I just ordered an Oreo McFlurry and learned — to my horror — that McDonald’s discontinued the McFlurry spoon.

I’m sure the new offering is cheaper and more sustainable or whatever, but that spoon was a crucial part of the experience. No two ways about it. And McDonald’s wonders why sales are stagnating! Anyways:

Pump.fun still runs the memecoin streets

Crypto’s mood seems to have soured on the memecoin trading platform pump.fun — but you wouldn’t know by checking its usage numbers.

Since pump.fun shifted its model to have buyers, instead of creators, foot the bill for new memecoins, there’s been increased scrutiny of how few memecoins gather enough investment to garner a hallowed Raydium migration. This followed similar scrutiny of celebrity Solana memecoins, which have nearly all performed poorly after launch.

Traders are grumpy about this. A quick X search shows post after post from users saying they’re “sick and tired” of a platform that has “ruined” memecoins. Pump.fun isn’t new to bad PR either: The then-nascent platform was exploited for nearly $2 million in May.

Competitors spied an opportunity. In June, the data platform DEX Screener released its own memecoin launchpad. More recently, Save and mrgn unveiled platforms allowing short positions on memecoins, allowing traders to profit from swooning token prices. 

And yet, several months into Solana’s memecoin craze, pump.fun seems immune to criticism.

Pump.fun is still second or third in revenue on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, trailing just Ethereum and Aave, according to DeFiLlama. Pump.fun is yet to show a meaningful dip in either transactions or fees since the platform first took off in March of this year.

Pump.fun is pulling in $348.5 million in annualized revenue, according to DeFiLlama. By way of comparison, the cloud security startup Wiz, valued at $10 billion, tagged $350 million in annual recurring revenue just earlier this year. One onchain sleuth calculated the launchpad to have accrued 0.1% of the total current Solana supply just six months after launch. Pump.fun is putting up big boy numbers. 

This hasn’t been a universal trend for memecoin platforms either: Pump.fun competitor Moonshot has seen its usage stats dwindle following a buzzy launch, according to a Dune dashboard. 

One factor helping propel pump.fun is the US election cycle and the popularity of “PolitiFi” tokens. This is especially true during live events, since pump.fun memecoins can be launched in seconds. 

The Biden-Trump debate was called the Super Bowl for memecoins. During Elon Musk’s interview with Donald Trump on X last night, one user said they would see memecoins based on the pair’s comments on pump.fun before hearing them live. 

And there’s also the fact that speculative crypto traders might not be deterred by losing money repeatedly. In a Solana subreddit thread guessing when the memecoin trend would die, one user wrote: “The day casinos die.”

Pump.fun has pursued an aggressive social strategy, seemingly feeding into controversy to keep itself in the conversation. It also launched live stream capability after seeing memecoin streams produce some viral moments. 

In an X post this morning, pump.fun’s anonymous founder alon promised “100x better curation” to help with the platform’s paradox of choice problem.

So, love it or hate it, pump.fun has proven its staying power.

— Jack Kubinec

The Solana ecosystem has had quite the year. Last year at Permissionless II, SOL was hovering around $20, sentiment was down bad, but many kept their heads down and kept shipping. 

Hear the biggest names in Solana ecosystem share their thoughts on the past, present, and future of Solana at Permissionless III in October.

You might find memecoins tedious to talk about (and we’ve been skeptical toward pump.fun ourselves), but there’s no denying their relevance to Solana:

Raydium leads Solana DEXes in market share.

Here is a list of the top five Raydium standard liquidity pools on Tuesday morning. All are memecoins, and they combined for over $50 million in trading volume over the past 24 hours. Some of this (I’m looking at you in particular, “Pookie”) might be wash trading, but either way, as Solana passes Ethereum in certain DEX metrics, memecoins will be in the driver’s seat.

— Jack Kubinec

It’s not every day that US cellular carriers dive headfirst into decentralized networks, but that appears to be exactly what’s happening with Helium’s Carrier Offload Beta. According to Helium, two anonymous behemoths, creatively dubbed "Carrier 1" and "Carrier 2," are currently testing the waters — or rather, the airwaves — by offloading their data onto Helium’s network.

The numbers for Carrier 1 are 185,378 total subscribers and 2,675 GB of data offloaded since June 18. Meanwhile, Carrier 2 has racked up 122,482 subscribers and 1,686 GB of data offloaded since June 25. Decentralization has never looked so corporate.

Crypto Twitter, of course, has feelings. @cozartskuxztt sums up the hype: "Awesome to see major carriers testing Helium! Decentralized networks are the future of coverage expansion." True believers are already envisioning a world where Helium hotspots handle "literally 200+ million potential phones connecting to hotspots," as @rawrmaan puts it. Probably nothing. No big deal.

But not everyone is convinced the network can handle the load — or the customer support. @KeithMJeffs warned, "I bet it doesn't go without a problem." @jackOswaldWh1t3 and @ProfPressure both complained below the announcement, "My ticket still hasn’t been answered and my hotspot still isn’t working."

The Helium team is basking in the glow of the beta’s early success, as telecom giants grapple with the realization that decentralization might just be their future — or at least their next big experiment.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Alon, co-founder of pump.fun: