In the first significant pivot away from memecoin roots, memecoin launchpad Pump.fun is launching a new investment arm aimed at backing promising startups.
Pump.fun announced Monday that it is launching a Pump Fund in parallel with a $3 million hackathon. The fund will finance 12 projects valued at $10 million and costing $250,000 each.
He added that the investment arm will “work long-term with projects” that don’t necessarily have to be crypto-related, and will provide guidance from Pump.fun’s founders.
The project was spurred by the meme coin trading frenzy at the time and comes as Pump.fun’s trading volume has declined from its highs in early 2025.
Pump.fun said its new investment arm will fund projects of “all levels of maturity, industry, and traction,” with a focus on teams that “ship quickly (and) openly communicate their plans.”
“We will assess the long-term viability of the project apart from product and social traction,” it added.
The hackathon, which lasts 30 days, allows participants to create tokens, share updates on their projects, and let the market act as a judge of whether a project is successful.
“Instead of pleasing judges and venture capitalists with money, tokenization allows the market to become the judge,” Pump.fun said. “It’s the users who are betting on you early and funding you.”
Demand for “great founders” remains incredibly high
Pump.fun co-founder Aron Cohen told X that the number of crypto trends over the past three years “demonstrates that the demand for great founders by traders and long-term investors is incredibly high, regardless of market conditions.”
He added that projects have started issuing tokens because “users liked buying into novel ideas they thought had a chance of success,” and there were millions of “potential users and investors.”
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“Instant liquidity meant you could get funded too,” Cohen said, which led to the emergence of artificial intelligence projects in cryptocurrencies and “showed both builders and traders how big this opportunity to tokenize early-stage projects could be.”
Pump.fun trading volume declines from high level
Pump.fun’s trading volume has been declining since its peak in late 2024 and early 2025.
According to Token Terminal, Pump.fun’s monthly trading volume reached a record high of $11.75 billion in January 2025, reaching the milestone just one year after its launch.
Monthly trading volumes have steadily declined since then, with the platform reaching $2.43 billion in trading volume in December as speculative assets like meme coins became less desirable for traders amid a tumultuous year for the broader market.
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