On January 20th, pump.fun officially announced a hackathon with a bounty pool of $3 million, and also announced the launch of the ecosystem venture fund, Pump Fund.

This is a very different kind of hackathon. There are no judges, no specific theme, and 12 winners will each receive $250,000. Because of these unique rules, before looking at the projects, we first need to understand the logic behind this hackathon.

Named a Hackathon, but in fact it's GFF 2.0

According to the official statement from pump.fun, this hackathon abandons the traditional model of trying to please judges or investors to win funding. Instead, it lets the market be the ultimate judge.

In short, everyone is encouraged to issue their own tokens, and then rely on their own abilities. Whose token performs better in the market, the one is more likely to succeed.

In addition to the requirement that tokens must be deployed before the hackathon application deadline, there are only two other constraints for the entire hackathon. First, the team must own at least 10% of the token supply, and preference will be given to teams that own 20% to 50% of the token supply. Second, the team must "build in the open," actively sharing their latest progress with the community, and preference will be given to teams that conduct at least 5 live streams per week on pump.fun.

The winning token will be acquired by pump.fun at a $10 million valuation, purchasing $250,000 worth of the token, with ongoing consulting and incubation support provided.

This is hard not to remind us of last August, when, in the face of a fierce challenge from bonk.fun at pump.fun, they launched the GFF (Glass Full Foundation), spending about $1.7 million to purchase some well-performing meme coins within their own ecosystem.

This time's hackathon, pump.fun is essentially still "buying coins," but it's done in a more open, transparent, and rule-based manner. Additionally, the themes are no longer limited to purely meme coins. Based on the above interpretation of the rules, we can speculate on pump.fun's objectives and its understanding of the current market:

- Want to create 12 assets with a market value of at least $10 million each

- Without good "control of the supply," there won't be new "golden dogs" (i.e., highly profitable or hyped stocks). If the supply control is good, it's called adapting to long-term development. If it's bad supply control, it's called tying things up.

- Still want to promote their own live streaming features

- The theme of pure meme coins is too narrow; more narratives are needed for greater revenue.

At the same time, they learned from the lessons of the previous GFF. The GFF's promotion had only one announcement and a vague goal of "giving back to the ecosystem," with themes limited purely to meme coins. Looking back now, it seems very much like a "wartime product" hastily created to respond to the challenge from bonk.fun and the negative public opinion environment.

If you follow GFF's investments, the cryptocurrency that offers the highest returns is $neet, which surged more than 200% within two months after being purchased by GFF. However, most other GFF holdings experience sharp short-term price spikes followed by a decline.

Will this time be different? We cannot predict the future, only learn from history. A conservative strategy might be:

- Focus more on new tokens, as new tokens can generate more revenue for pump.fun

- Focus more on topics beyond pure meme coins, such as AI, Vibe Coding, or pump.fun live coins

- More emphasis is placed on team background and influence, because this is a competition that depends on market performance. If the founders are initially unknown, it's difficult to get started in the current market environment.

- It shouldn't be too grand or long-term; we don't expect pump.fun to do anything like helping in times of need.

All of the above tells us that it's not easy to directly bet on "who will become the winner." If a token is performing strongly in the market, it actually doesn't need the endorsement of pump.fun to break through a $10 million market cap. Conversely, if a token relies on pump.fun's endorsement as a driving force for its price increase, it may not be that strong or excellent on its own.

Here, we can only rely on some existing information and personal opinions that do not constitute investment advice to take a look together at which projects are worth observing.

Three "Examples" from the official source

First are the three tokens officially presented as "examples" at this hackathon, which are $MIA, $RAIN, and $MONEROCHAN.

$MIA focuses on interactive, multi-platform AI companions with genuine emotions, $RAIN focuses on AI automated market betting predictions, and $MONEROCHAN focuses on privacy DeFi on Solana.

The market cap of $RAIN is approximately $17 million, while $MIA and $MONEROCHAN are each around $1 million. However, none of these three tokens have publicly announced on their official Twitter accounts whether they have applied to participate in the current pump.fun hackathon. Additionally, for $MIA and $MONEROCHAN, it is unclear whether their teams meet the hackathon's requirement of "holding at least 10% of the token supply."

However, according to the $LUMEN token's developer's tweet, holding at least 10% of the token supply is acceptable if there is a reasonable explanation.

LUMEN dev stated that they only held 5% of the token supply at launch, and have continuously used platform fees for project development instead of selling tokens. This approach was understood and approved by the official pump.fun team, allowing them to participate in the competition.

From the 3 "examples" provided by pump.fun, we can also see that pump.fun may be more inclined toward the three areas of AI, prediction markets, and privacy.

New project observation with clearly submitted application

LUMEN is developing a robot that carries a large language model (LLM) capable of continuous learning and evolution, and also possesses genuine emotions. The final product will be delivered to its holders. All delivered products will connect to a cloud server in the backend, enabling all robots in the hands of holders to grow and improve in sync. The current market cap of this token is approximately 1.5 million USD.

LUMEN robot

Under the AI theme, another noteworthy competitor is $GOLD, whose developer is Shaw, the former founder of elizaOS and ai16z. However, Shaw has already launched numerous projects from TreasureDAO to ai16z, and his reputation among the community is not very good.

$GOLD is the in-game token of the new game Hyperscape being developed by Shaw and his team, with 1 $GOLD equaling 1 in-game token. As the name suggests, it is a retro-style MMORPG similar to Runescape. The game is built using AI and will include AI agents powered by elizaOS. The game will also be open-source.

After briefly surging to a market cap of nearly $3 million, $GOLD's current market cap is now only about $360,000. Many players have mocked Shaw, but the final outcome remains uncertain.

In the prediction market space, one of the more notable competitors is $PUMPCADE, a prediction market platform that focuses on real-time betting on short-term volatility. Compared to prediction markets that are more suitable for expressing long-term beliefs, Pumpcade targets users who prefer short-term trading. For example, users can bet on the odds of events like "Whether Trump will buy Greenland" within the next hour, or they can use a data source plugin developed for Runescape to place real-time bets on the immediate rewards after defeating a boss in the game.

Real-time creation of a prediction for NVIDIA's stock price 5 minutes later

The coin's current market capitalization is approximately $3 million, having once approached $15 million at its peak.

The three non-"case" projects mentioned above have clearly confirmed their participation in the pump.fun hackathon. However, this is for market observation only and does not constitute investment advice.

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