Pump.fun suspends livestream feature amid backlash

pump.fun’s anonymous founder said they would work to protect users from seeing “repulsive/dangerous content”

article-image

pump.fun and Adobe stock modified by Blockworks

share


This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.


The Solana memecoin launchpad pump.fun faced backlash over the weekend after a number of violent and unsavory livestreams on the platform started making the rounds on social media. By Monday afternoon, its livestream feature had been temporarily deactivated. 

The offending streams ranged from token launchers threatening to commit violent acts unless a coin’s price goes up to racist or disgusting content meant to create viral shock value and juice the token’s price. This all happened as pump.fun booked staggering $14.3 million in revenue on Saturday, according to a pump.fun dashboard, nearly tripling its previous high. 

Pump.fun is no stranger to edgy content. The site has drawn comparisons to the anonymous forum site 4chan for its often-unhinged content and lax approach to moderation. Before this current wave of disturbing livestreams, pump.fun had a large number of racially insensitive or pornographic tokens, none of which are subject to content moderation.

But as disturbing livestreams went viral on X, pump.fun’s anonymous founder alon wrote that the platform would work to protect users from seeing “repulsive/dangerous content.” In a separate thread, alon said pump had taken down a stream of a user threatening to shoot their dog unless a token’s market capitalization increased, noting that the platform has now taken down “hundreds of streams.”

A little after 2:00 p.m., pump.fun disabled livestreams on the platform altogether. In a blog post shortly after, pump.fun cited “unprecedented growth” as the key challenge to content moderation before adding that livestreams would be paused “for an indefinite time period.”

This feels like an inflection point for a platform that has separated itself as the most viral application on Solana, booking nearly $250 million in revenue since launching. Largely on the back of memecoin activity emanating from pump.fun, Solana has seen record demand for its blockspace, which in turn has lined the pockets of the validators who run the blockchain’s software.

Leaders in the Solana world largely cast memecoins either as a stress test for the network or as an emerging, if currently unserious, financial use case for memes. Even among those who oppose crypto being used for what is essentially gambling, it’s frowned upon to tell users or developers what they should or shouldn’t do with blockchain technology. 

Multiple crypto posters shrugged off the pump.fun criticism, pointing out that every large social tech platform has had its warts with content moderation. 

But as Solana and crypto hopes for a shift to the mainstream, some are calling for a reckoning with memecoins’ downsides.

“Pump Fun is going to become a massive reputational stain on the crypto industry, on par with FTX,” Chainlink community liaison Zach Rynes wrote on X. Tech lawyer Preston Byrne also pointed out that the platform “does a lot very incorrectly from a social media law” perspective.

Up until now, pump.fun’s playbook has largely been to make light of criticism through trolling. With livestreams disabled, it appears this particular round of backlash hit home. It remains to be seen whether this will make any difference for traders in the so-called memecoin trenches.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Unlocked by Template (10).png

Research

Innovations on Aptos’ technical design through Raptr, Shardines, and Zaptos approach near-optimal latency and throughput by unlocking 100% utilization of network resources, with the capacity to settle 260k transactions per second with latencies less than 800ms. The original Move language was revamped with the launch of Move 2, supporting more expressivity in smart contract logic and a scalable ability to interact with high volume datasets. The ecosystem has benefitted from strong asset inflows, now hosting over $1.3B in stablecoins, $450M in bridged BTC, and $530M in RWAs. Activity in the Aptos ecosystem has grown notably over the past year, with monthly application revenue reaching ~$835k and monthly DEX volumes growing to over $5B, both at new all time highs.

article-image

Interchain Labs will focus on sovereign L1s and institutional demand, abandoning plans for smart contracts on the Cosmos Hub

article-image

Also, only three tokens have outperformed bitcoin so far this year: XMR, HYPE and SKY

article-image

The fund group has submitted proposals in recent months for other funds that would hold litecoin, solana, XRP, HBAR, Sui and others

article-image

Momentum’s back — BTC leads, risk assets follow

article-image

Ondo Finance’s acquisition of blockchain development company Strangelove follows its buy of Oasis Pro

article-image

Cryptocurrency and stock traders alike had a lot to unpack Wednesday