What if memecoins properly return and they really make a comeback ? I think $pump could be the best bet to make gains instead of trading random memecoins in the search of next 2-5-10-100x gains The basic thesis is simple.. Instead of trying to pick the one player who wins at the casino, you own exposure to the platform earning from almost everyone who enters. And when I looked into the actual numbers, @Pumpfun is already a much bigger and more profitable business than its current valuation suggests.. $PUMP is trading around $0.00146 with a market cap of roughly $586M and an FDV of around $1.24B The token is still down about 83.5% from its ATH of $0.0088 and roughly 64% below the $0.004 public-sale price So despite Pump becoming one of the highest-earning crypto applications, the token has basically been destroyed since launch. Now compare that valuation with the actual business. Over the last 30 days, users paid around $73.9M in fees across Pump’s launchpad, PumpSwap and trading terminal. Pump retained around $28.1M as protocol revenue, while approximately $10.5M was directed towards PUMP holders through buybacks. PumpSwap itself processed around $19.5B in volume during the same period. And since launch, Pump has generated approximately $1.85B in total fees, $1.2B in retained protocol revenue and $308.7M in cumulative token buybacks. Just think about that for a second. The company has already generated more than twice the token’s current market cap in cumulative revenue. Even using only the latest 30-day revenue of $28.1M, Pump is currently running at roughly $337M in annualised revenue. That puts $PUMP at around 1.7x annualised revenue based on circulating market cap and roughly 3.7x based on FDV. Those are obviously not guaranteed forward numbers, but for one of the most recognisable consumer applications in crypto, the current valuation is not expensive if the business can even maintain its present activity. And this is where the memecoin thesis becomes interesting. 18.67M tokens launched through https://t.co/yMVGHC5Q8D between January 2024 and June 2026. Around 68.7% stopped trading on the same day they launched. More than 80% stopped trading within two days. Only 4.55% remained active for longer than 90 days. 832,941 @PumpfunEco launches between May 8 and June 10, 2026. Only 0.198% graduated within 24 hours. That works out to roughly 1 successful graduation for every 500 launches, and the graduation rate is now around 3.2x lower than the 0.63% recorded during September and October 2025. Normally, those numbers would sound extremely bearish. But for Pump, I think they actually explain the thesis. Almost everyone launching or buying these coins will fail to find the next $FARTCOIN, PNUT, MOODENG or GOAT. Pump does not need to know which one wins. It earns when the token is launched, when people trade on the bonding curve, when it graduates, when it trades on PumpSwap and when users trade through its terminal. Thousands of coins can die while the platform still earns from all the activity that happened before they died. That is why $PUMP is potentially a much cleaner memecoin bet than trying to build a portfolio of individual memes. Pump is already supporting roughly 92,000 daily active users, 305,000 weekly users and around 700,000 monthly users. PumpSwap has processed approximately $414M over the last 24 hours, $4.07B over seven days, $19.49B over 30 days and almost $332B cumulatively. The platform also has around $232M in TVL today. More importantly, Pump is no longer just a basic page where anyone can launch a coin. It now controls the launchpad, the bonding curve, the native PumpSwap exchange and its own trading terminal. So instead of sending graduated tokens and their volume to another exchange, Pump can keep more of the entire lifecycle inside its own ecosystem. Creators are becoming another important part of that loop. During Q1 2026, creators earned around $133.6M through tracked https://t.co/yMVGHC5Q8D and PumpSwap creator fees. They earned another $85.7M in Q2. That means more than $219M was paid to creators during the first half of 2026 alone. This gives creators a direct financial reason to keep launching, building communities and bringing users back to the platform. The Pump ecosystem itself is already worth around $1.67B, excluding PUMP. Together, Pump ecosystem tokens are still generating close to $200M in daily trading volume even during a much weaker memecoin environment. So if memecoin activity returns, Pump can benefit from several things happening together. - More people will launch tokens. - More traders will enter bonding curves. - More coins will graduate. - PumpSwap volume should increase. - Creators should earn more. - Terminal activity should rise. - Protocol revenue should increase. And because part of that revenue is used to buy and burn $PUMP, the token can directly benefit from the higher activity. That last part is what separates $PUMP from many other exchange or ecosystem tokens. DeFiLlama currently tracks around $10.5M of holder revenue over the last 30 days and $308.7M cumulatively. If the latest 30-day pace continued for a year, it would equal roughly $126M in annual buybacks. Against a market cap of approximately $586M, that represents a gross annualised buyback yield of more than 21%. Of course, that is not a dividend and there is no guarantee the current revenue continues. Memecoin volume can disappear quickly, the buyback policy can eventually change and tokens being bought back does not automatically mean the price goes up. But the current maths is still difficult to ignore. Pump is producing real revenue, part of that revenue creates direct demand for $PUMP, and repurchased tokens are being removed from the supply. This is probably the strongest part of the thesis for me. The platform does not need to create a new business model to give the token value. It mainly needs to keep doing what it already does and increase activity. But the current trend is not perfect. Pump generated around $122.2M in retained revenue during Q1 2026, before falling to $91.6M in Q2. That is a decline of roughly 25%. The current 30-day revenue of $28.1M is also around 31% below Q1’s average monthly revenue and about 8% below Q2’s monthly average. PumpSwap’s latest daily volume of $414M is around 36% below its 30-day daily average of roughly $650M. So this is not a thesis that memecoin activity is already returning strongly. Right now, it is a bet that activity eventually returns. The good thing is that Pump has already survived one serious launchpad war. Its share of Solana’s graduated-token market reportedly fell as low as 5% in August 2025, while a competitor bonkfun briefly controlled more than 80% Within roughly two weeks, Pump recovered to around 90% market share while bonk fell to approximately 3%. That shows two things. First, Pump’s moat is not permanent. Token-launch technology can be copied and users can move quickly when another platform offers better incentives. But it also shows how powerful Pump’s distribution, brand, liquidity and existing creator network can be. The moat is not the bonding curve itself. The moat is that traders already expect the next major Solana memecoin to appear there, which attracts creators, and those creators attract more traders. Still, the biggest risk to $PUMP is clearly the supply. The nominal maximum supply is 1T tokens, while around 401.5B are currently circulating. on CoinGecko a total supply of approximately 849.7B after the tokens already removed from supply. The original allocation gave 33% to the ICO, 24% to community and ecosystem initiatives, 20% to the team, 13% to existing investors, 3% to livestreaming, 2.6% to liquidity and exchanges, 2.4% to the ecosystem fund and 2% to the foundation. So there is still a meaningful amount of team, investor and ecosystem supply outside the circulating market. The first major insider cliff has already happened. The next scheduled unlock is on August 12, when approximately 4.17B team tokens and 2.71B investor tokens will unlock. Combined, that is 6.875B PUMP, currently worth around $10M and equal to roughly 1.7% of the circulating float. Similar monthly unlocks are expected to continue under the current vesting schedule. This creates a very interesting piece of maths. Pump bought back approximately $10.5M of PUMP during the last 30 days. The next monthly team and investor unlock is currently worth approximately $10M. So at the current token price and revenue level, monthly buybacks are roughly equal to the dollar value of monthly insider unlocks. That sounds balanced, but the margin is extremely thin. If protocol revenue falls, buybacks will no longer match unlocks. And if the price of PUMP rises while revenue stays flat, the dollar value of each token unlock rises while the amount of money available for buybacks does not. Also, unlocked tokens are not guaranteed to be sold, just as buybacks are not guaranteed to create permanent price support. But the comparison tells us exactly what needs to improve. Pump needs revenue and buybacks to grow faster than the value of the new supply entering the market. The other major risk is that the platform is still completely dependent on speculative attention. Pump can launch millions of tokens, but that does not mean the market is healthy. When more than 80% of coins stop trading within two days and only around 0.2% graduate, users can eventually become tired of repeatedly losing money. If traders stop believing that the next launch can become a major winner, token creation alone will not be enough to maintain volume. There are also market-quality, legal and operational risks. Pump suffered a $2M private-key compromise in May 2024, and recent research identified 1,012 persistent groups of wallets repeatedly appearing among the earliest buyers across multiple launches. That study did not prove those wallets caused the higher activity around the affected tokens, but it does show how coordinated and difficult this market can be for normal traders. So I would not call $PUMP a safe or obvious investment. The token is down more than 80% from its high for real reasons. Current activity is below peak levels. Revenue declined from Q1 to Q2. The graduation rate is extremely low. Competition can appear quickly. And the token still has significant unlocks ahead. But at the same time, it is difficult to find many crypto applications with approximately $1.2B in cumulative revenue, $1.85B in cumulative fees, $332B in DEX volume, around 700,000 monthly active users and more than $308M already directed towards token buybacks, while the token itself trades below a $600M market cap. This is why I think the risk:reward becomes interesting if you believe memecoins will eventually have another major cycle. best thing is Pump does not need every coin to succeed. It does not even need most coins to survive for more than a day. It just needs people to keep believing they can find or create the next winner. If PumpSwap volume returns above $1B per day, monthly revenue moves back towards $50M, creators continue earning, market share remains strong and half of that growing activity continues flowing into token buybacks and burns, the current valuation could start looking very cheap. At $50M in monthly revenue, Pump would be producing $600M annually, roughly equal to the token’s entire current market cap. And if buybacks scaled alongside that activity, the protocol could be buying a meaningful percentage of the circulating market every year. That is the bull case. The bear case is also straightforward. Memecoin activity never properly returns, monthly PumpSwap volume falls below $10B, retained revenue drops below $15M, users and creators move to another platform, and monthly unlocks become consistently larger than buybacks. In that scenario, the current low valuation would not be an opportunity. It would simply reflect a declining business with heavy dilution. So the numbers I am watching from here are PumpSwap volume, daily and monthly active users, protocol revenue, creator earnings, graduation rate, launchpad market share, monthly buybacks and how the market absorbs each new unlock. Back to the main question. If memecoins return, is $PUMP the clearest way to benefit from the entire cycle rather than trying to pick individual winners? I think it probably is. Not because every Pump coin will win. The data shows almost all of them will fail. But while millions of traders compete to find the few coins that survive, Pump keeps earning from the entire process. $PUMP is basically a bet that the casino gets busy again. And instead of guessing who leaves the casino rich, you own exposure to the platform collecting fees from nearly everyone who plays.