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đź’‚ Pump.fun restricted, innit?

The memecoin launchpad pump.fun is no longer available to UK users

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Howdy!

The Ethereum NFT project Pudgy Penguins is launching a token on Solana, which is probably above all else an indicator that if you’re still in NFTs, it's high time to pivot to memecoins. 

Today, we’ve got pump.fun’s UK restriction, liquid staking tokens, and a news roundup.

Pump.fun restricts access for UK users

The team behind the memecoin launchpad pump.fun began restricting UK users this morning.

The move came days after the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority tagged pump.fun as unauthorized. Most firms need the regulator’s approval to do finance-related business in the country. It's apparently the platform's first public restriction, despite facing past criticism for its fast-and-loose approach to moderation.

Notably, pump.fun — which allows users to launch Solana-based tokens for around $2 — took down its livestreaming feature last week after a number of violent and disturbing streams went viral.

The site’s UK block doesn’t represent a ban per se, Shardspace co-founder Avaunt said in the Lightspeed Telegram chat. Rather, pump.fun likely never properly registered and complied with the UK’s crypto guidelines, and the regulator is just now holding it accountable.

Pump.fun has some apparent links to the UK. When the then-nascent platform was exploited by former contractor Jarett Dunn in May, he was arrested in London. Dunn, a notorious online troll, did make a seemingly-serious claim that pump.fun is linked to a UK-based entity called Baton Corporation. 

“Pump is not legally based in the UK,” the platform’s pseudonymous founder alon told me in a text, but they declined to elaborate further.

Zooming out for a second though, it’s somewhat surprising a pump.fun restriction took this long in the first place. The UK is no crypto libertarian paradise — for example, prediction market favorite Polymarket is already unavailable there. The UK’s financial regulator claims to have taken down “over 900 scam crypto websites and over 50 apps” since October 2023.

“Thought IP [address] restrictions were pretty common in this industry lol not quite sure why [everyone is] freaking out,” Tom, anonymous contributor to Raydium, told me in a text.

Pump.fun has been the most popular app on Solana — and at times in all of crypto — for much of this year. With that popularity will inevitably come scrutiny, especially when users are beheading chickens on livestream in hopes of making a token’s price go up. If Gary Gensler’s SEC tenure were to continue past this year, it’s hard to imagine the SEC wouldn’t have taken some sort of action against pump.fun, too.

How the fallout from pump.fun’s livestream snafu settles will be something to watch. Perhaps regulators will be able to do what criticism or backlash never could — slow down a startup that has already generated $283 million in revenue in its first year of existence.

— Jack Kubinec

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Brought to you by:

Renaud Partners is the premier go-to-market consulting firm for early-stage Solana teams.

We’ve been deeply involved in the community since 2021, supporting some of the best known projects in the ecosystem.

We help teams with their go-to-market, brand positioning, social and PR, and fundraising strategy.

We also work across other ecosystems including Monad, Base and TON.

If you're a team looking to expedite your marketing success, let’s talk: [email protected] or @rockin_renaud on telegram.

Slowly, slowly: 

The share of staked Solana that corresponds to liquid staking tokens crept above 8% this week. Liquid staking tokens let users earn staking rewards while holding a liquid token that can be used in DeFi applications.

Still, 8% isn’t a whole lot, especially in a year that saw Sanctum’s buzzy launch and promise of an “infinite LST future.” As SOL staking rewards remain high, investors seem content to set and forget their tokens.

— Jack Kubinec

Brought to you by:

Renaud Partners is the premier go-to-market consulting firm for early-stage Solana teams.

We’ve been deeply involved in the community since 2021, supporting some of the best known projects in the ecosystem.

We help teams with their go-to-market, brand positioning, social and PR, and fundraising strategy.

We also work across other ecosystems including Monad, Base and TON.

If you're a team looking to expedite your marketing success, let’s talk: [email protected] or @rockin_renaud on telegram.

ICYMI: Highlights from the Solana ecosystem this week

  • Grass, Ontocord, and LAION launched VALID, a new video-audio dataset with 30 million snippets for machine learning research.

  • Coinbase blamed sluggish Solana withdrawals on blockchain issues, later attributing the delays to internal indexer problems.

  • Transak, a Web3 payments infrastructure provider, recorded a 400% surge in Solana transactions following its integration with Phantom wallet.

  • Kash Dhanda, founding member of Superteam and advisor to several Solana projects, announced that he will join Jupiter Exchange full-time starting Jan. 1.

  • Nozomi, a new solution by Temporal to enhance transaction speed and reliability on Solana, announced open beta access.

  • BonkBot launched Supercharged Limit Orders, introducing advanced features such as Trailing Stop Loss and Partial Fills.

  • Kamino Finance introduced Kamino Swap on Solana, featuring fee-free trading, slippage elimination, and MEV protection.

  • Financial Times acknowledged its long-standing negative stance on crypto and issued a mea culpa to readers.

  • Meow, co-founder of Jupiter Exchange, faced backlash over the use of a racial slur, followed by a public statement addressing the incident.

  • Jupiter Exchange added support for iCloud Backup, allowing users to securely store wallet recovery phrases and private keys.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Ryan Connor, research manager at Blockworks Research: