PUMP unlocks 20% of tokens, with a $125 million cap—can the reduced buyback still hold up?

Pump.fun made $28.4 million a month, but PUMP faces a double test: unlocking 82.5 billion tokens and a share of buybacks dropping from 100% to 50%.
(Backgrounder: Comment》Has Solana been wiped clean, and is the memecoin meme-game over?)
(Background detail: FTX is preparing to dump $2 billion worth of Solana! Will the 3/1 unlock of “auction at the lowest with a 34% discount” crash the market?)

Table of contents

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• Pump.fun’s outstanding revenue performance
• Unlock pressure and market absorption
• How reduced buybacks affect buy demand

Even though the Meme market has clearly cooled compared with its peak period, Pump.fun is still one of Web 3’s most profitable protocols. According to DefiLlama data, over the past 30 days, Pump.fun generated protocol revenue of $28.4 million—higher than Polymarket’s $22.12 million in monthly revenue, and only behind Hyperliquid’s $43.93 million.

Web 3 protocol monthly revenue ranking

Someone launches a token, and it collects fees; someone trades it, and it collects fees. From birth to zero, a Meme coin can take a fee from every buy and sell. Since launching more than two years ago, Pump.fun has issued over 12 million tokens. Its cumulative revenue is about $1.05 billion, and it once became the first application on Solana to break $1 billion in revenue.

Pump.fun uses part of its revenue for buybacks and burns PUMP, turning the money the platform earns into token buy demand. But last night at 10 PM, this value loop faced its biggest test yet. PUMP’s first unlock covers team and investor tokens totaling 82.5 billion—8.25% of the total supply. This is equivalent to 20.23% of the circulating supply before the unlock, worth about $125 million.

By comparison, PUMP’s trading volume over the past 24 hours is only $28 million. So will the potential sell pressure of $125 million cause a cliff-like drop in PUMP’s price? And how much can the platform’s buybacks absorb? Is PUMP still worth buying?

On April 29 this year, Pump.fun burned 129 billion PUMP in one shot, accounting for 12.9% of the maximum supply— the largest single burn in PUMP’s history.

Pump.fun’s outstanding revenue performance

In terms of quantity, burning 129 billion tokens is even more than the 82.5 billion tokens unlocked this time, but the two cannot directly offset each other. Most of the PUMP being burned had already been bought back by the platform in advance and stored in specific wallets, so it was not freely circulating in the market. Concentrated burning simply removes these tokens completely; it does not create additional buy demand for 129 billion tokens on the day in April.

This unlock is completely the opposite. The 82.5 billion tokens allocated to the team and investors, which previously could not be traded, have started entering the secondary market since last night. What gets reduced in April is the on-paper total supply, while what gets expanded in July is the potential sellable float.

Also, 82.5 billion tokens are only the first batch. The team and investors collectively hold 330 billion PUMP. In this unlock, only one-quarter is released; the remaining 247.5 billion tokens are still locked. Worth noting: there are also 240 billion community tokens for which no clear release schedule has been announced.

PUMP token allocation chart

Combined, these two portions total 487.5 billion tokens—1.2 times the circulating supply before the unlock. The market not only needs to digest the current 82.5 billion tokens, but also face long-term uncertainty about future supply.

Pump.fun’s most stable source of buy demand has historically come from the platform’s token buybacks.

Unlock pressure and market absorption

After buybacks started in July 2025, Pump.fun temporarily allocated 100% of net protocol fees to buying PUMP. In September last year, the monthly buyback amount surged to $55.3 million—higher even than that month’s $42.8 million in protocol revenue.

But in April this year, Pump.fun said it would reduce the buyback ratio from 100% to 50%, with the other half kept for the company’s operations, including hiring, marketing, and acquisitions. In June, the single-month PUMP buyback amount fell to just $9.2 million—down more than 80% from the peak.

Comparison chart of PUMP revenue and token buybacks

Looking across a longer six-month period makes the gap even clearer. In the second half of 2025, Pump.fun spent about $217 million to buy back PUMP; in the first half of 2026, it spent only $72.2 million, a 67% drop. Over the same period, protocol revenue only fell 18%.

Pump.fun is still very profitable, but much less capital is actually flowing into PUMP now. Based on the June buyback scale of $9.2 million, this unlock’s sellable supply would only need to sell about 7% to offset one month of the platform’s buybacks.

Sell pressure is right in front of us, but when you view it across the whole market, there aren’t many platforms that can keep delivering high income.

Reduced buybacks affect buy demand

Hyperliquid, which has higher revenue than Pump.fun, generated about $43.93 million in protocol revenue over the past 30 days. But HYPE’s current market cap is already close to $15 billion—more than 20 times PUMP’s. Polymarket made about $22.12 million over the past 30 days. It has not yet issued a token, and the funding valuation it previously leaked was already $15 billion. Even if it issues in the future, the valuation is unlikely to get cheap.

By contrast, Pump.fun generated $28.4 million in the past 30 days, yet PUMP’s market cap is only about $610 million. It has unlock pressure, and buybacks are shrinking—but at least the platform’s income is real and the business model is stable, and the token has already fallen to a relatively lower valuation.

More importantly, Pump.fun doesn’t rely on a single breakout Meme coin. As long as the market keeps issuing and trading tokens, the platform can continuously collect fees. Betting on PUMP, in essence, isn’t betting on the next Meme—it’s betting that whether in a bear market or a bull market, the Meme market will keep replicating hotspots, and that Pump.fun can continue to guard this one high-traffic entry point.

In a bear market, selecting DCA targets isn’t about finding projects with no issues. It’s about choosing, among a pile of risks, the protocols that still have users, are still making money, and still have the ability to keep buying back. From this perspective, PUMP isn’t perfect, but among high-revenue platform tokens, it’s still one of the few choices whose valuation hasn’t been pushed to the sky.

The challenge of unlocking 82.5 billion tokens tests short-term absorption capacity; what determines how far PUMP can go is Pump.fun’s revenue. As long as this Meme machine keeps making money, PUMP may not end up in the “unlock means zero” storyline. Right now, it’s actually a pretty good timing for long-term DCA.