Altcoins
|4 min ReadPUMP chases growth with a buyback flywheel
Maya Chen
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
Degens do not fly to Vegas. They gamble on Pump. This casino pays its players by design. Fees from every gambler, streamer, and speculator cycle into buybacks. You are not betting against the house. You are the house.
Upbit and Binance just listed PUMP. A bout of selling hit on listing. Cautious traders watched the tape and the candles.
Revenue does not lie
Last week told a simple story. Pump revenue was 14 million dollars. Hype revenue was 16 million dollars. Weekly income is similar. Yet Hype’s valuation is roughly ten times Pump’s. That gap is a mispricing. Mispricings do not last.
Streaming is early
Twitch is a massive business. It barely pays creators. Pump flips the script. It tokenizes attention and pays more. One million dollars of streamer-token volume means ten thousand dollars or more in payouts. The model scales with engagement.
Annualized revenue stacks up. Pump is about 750 million dollars. Twitch is about 1.7 billion dollars. If adoption is only average, Pump clears one billion dollars in revenue. That is the thesis. Creator income is surging since token plus livestream launched.
This happened while Solana DEX volumes stayed soft. Even so, pump.fun generated heavy revenue. That is resilience.
The buyback engine
Risk appetite rises into Q4. Crypto gamblers will not head to the Strip. They will bet on PUMP ecosystem tokens. Every new graduation bet means more fees. More fees mean more buybacks. More buybacks mean tighter float. That is the loop.
Pump has already repurchased about 85.37 million dollars of tokens. That equals 6.1 percent of circulating supply. Daily buybacks run 1 to 2.5 million dollars. The monthly peak run rate sits near 100 to 150 million dollars. Core pool liquidity is only 20 to 30 million dollars. Buybacks hit like a truck.
The moat is creator revenue share. Most memes die after the hype. Revenue share fixes that. Creators now earn up to ten times higher fees as their tokens grow. More than two million dollars went to creators in the first 24 hours. Pumpswap volume has topped Raydium plus Meteora with 878 million dollars in a day. MEXC lists a Pump ecosystem token every Monday. Developers stay because their upside scales with users. That is how you build a moat.
Mindshare is climbing. After a July washout, Pump bottomed and kept rising. Share of attention rebounded from about 3 percent to over 6 percent and is still climbing. Sentiment is turning up after the ICO dump, despite the skeptics.
Pump is not standing still. It recycles 98 percent of revenue into buybacks. It integrates Bubblemaps to surface token flows. It runs loyalty airdrops to retain users. It reframes memes as viral apps. Fees drive revenue. Revenue drives buybacks. Buybacks squeeze supply. If the curve tracks HYPE, the gap closes. Act before the crowd asks why.
Disclaimer: This document is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed in this document are not, and should not be taken as, investment advice or recommendations. Recipients should do their own due diligence, taking into account their specific financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance, which are not considered here, before investing. This document is not an offer, or the solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any of the assets mentioned.