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|7 min ReadPump.fun Buys Back Hard, Adds AI, But Meme Tide Keeps Falling
Lucca Menezes
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
Pump.fun has been a money machine in Solana’s meme world. It mints culture, volume and fees at a pace that would make many DeFi teams jealous. Yet its own token, PUMP, is stuck in a brutal drawdown. The team is firing both cannons at once: a huge buyback program and a flashy new AI “Mayhem Mode.” So far, the market is not impressed.
Behind the drama is something bigger than a single platform. Pump.fun is still one of the strongest players in its niche. The problem is that the meme cycle itself looks tired. When the tide goes out, even the biggest meme factory feels the cold.
Numbers Fall From Peak, But Pump.fun Still Leads The Pack
To understand the problem, you start with the data. As of mid November, Pump.fun still pulls in more than 1 million dollars in revenue per day. That keeps it in the top five protocols in all of crypto. At the start of the year though, daily revenue often sat near 4 million. The drop is clear.
New token issuance tells the same story. At the peak, the platform saw roughly 70,000 new tokens per day. Now that figure is under 20,000. Daily active wallets are also down from the highs, but they have stayed above 100,000 in the last three months, which is not a collapse. The “graduation rate” for tokens, meaning the share of launched tokens that reach a higher tier on Pump.fun, has been below 1 percent since February. In September it hit 0.58 percent. Winning the meme lottery keeps getting harder.
Viewed alone, these charts look ugly. Set them against the rest of the market and they look much better. The entire meme sector is shrinking. Within that shrinking pie, Pump.fun is taking almost all the slices.
On 12 November, across Solana meme launch platforms, Pump.fun accounted for about 14,800 token launches, or roughly 93.4 percent of the total. During the earlier “meme launch platform war,” its share once fell as low as 16.8 percent. Today the rivals are tiny.
So yes, the platform is well below its all time activity, but compared with its peers it still looks resilient. The problem is that markets price future stories, not just past dominance. PUMP is meant to be a bet on the meme minting machine itself, and that story has been hard to sell.
Buybacks, Mayhem Mode And A Token That Keeps Sliding
The team has not been passive. Since launching the PUMP token in July, Pump.fun has poured about 98 percent of platform revenue into buybacks. In raw terms, that is more than 173.7 million dollars spent buying PUMP, equal to 11.19 percent of the circulating supply.
In the league table of buyback protocols, Pump.fun ranks second. Only Hyperliquid buys back more per day. It is a tremendous effort.
The price does not care. From its September high, PUMP fell as much as 83 percent at the bottom, down to about 0.0015 dollars. The current drawdown is still around 60 percent. Over the same period, Bitcoin’s maximum pullback was roughly 23 percent. Hyperliquid’s HYPE token fell around 40 percent. PUMP has been hit far harder.
When cash support failed to turn the tide, the team tried a new narrative. On 12 November, Pump.fun rolled out an experimental feature called “Mayhem Mode.” The idea is simple on paper and wild in branding. AI agents join early trading in selected new tokens. For each chosen token, the system mints an extra 1 billion units, doubling total supply to 2 billion. Over 24 hours, AI agents carry out “random trades” to pump early liquidity, then any unsold portion is burned.
In theory this could create more active books and juicier early action. In practice, it launched with real chaos. Users reported bugs like over-minting supply, draining creator funds and locking user funds. The rollout sparked anger instead of excitement.
Well known meme KOL pepe boost did not sugarcoat it. After watching the feature live, they said there was no clear boost in volume compared with normal tokens. What looked like a big new chapter ended up feeling like “just some experimental AI for fun” on Pump.fun.
Meme Cycle Turns, And Pump.fun Feels The Tide
So why do massive buybacks fail, and why does a new AI feature flop in the market’s eyes? The answer sits above the protocol. The market is not just selling PUMP. It is selling the meme narrative as a whole.
First comes the macro picture. The broader market has been in a sharper correction, with almost all tokens trading lower. In that environment, buybacks work like brakes, not engines. They can slow the fall, but they rarely reverse a macro downtrend by themselves. Hyperliquid is the proof. It also has strong revenue and a big buyback scheme, but its HYPE token still dropped about 40 percent from the high.
Second comes the bot story. Some traders argue that Pump.fun’s huge volumes are “fake,” inflated by high frequency bots that wash around thin markets. If that bubble pops, the argument goes, price must fall.
New research from PANews looked deeper. The team sampled recent trades for 10 non-graduated tokens and checked behavior patterns. They found that about 54.7 percent of trades were from bots. Each bot averaged 22 trades per token, while each real user averaged 1.8 trades. In dollar terms, an average bot trade was about 68 dollars, and total bot volume was roughly 45.6 percent of volume.
Interestingly, this bot share is lower than in earlier studies. So yes, “bot volume” is a structural issue. It has been baked into Pump.fun’s business model for a long time, and it distorts some headline numbers. But it is not getting dramatically worse, and likely is not the main driver of the recent price slide.
The third and most important force is the meme cycle itself. Investors are losing faith in meme coins as a category. PUMP, as the core token of the main Solana meme launchpad, becomes a proxy for that whole future. When the sector view turns negative, PUMP trades like a short on the meme dream.
Solana metrics add weight to this. Active wallet counts on Solana have dropped to a 12 month low. This chain has been the main battlefield for meme trading. When its general activity shrinks, the fuel for meme speculation dries up.
Other launch platforms tell an even harsher story. LetsBonk.fun, which briefly threatened Pump.fun’s lead back in July, saw its activity collapse after August. It now hosts roughly 200 new tokens a day. That is tiny compared with Pump.fun’s thousands.
In this kind of sector wide retreat, Pump.fun actually looks like the strongest survivor. It still earns millions. It still dominates market share. Yet its token bleeds because the category it represents is out of favor.
The clean conclusion is blunt. The market is not simply dumping Pump.fun because the team is doing a bad job. It is dumping the meme sector, and Pump.fun’s token sits right at the center of that trade. Pump.fun is the first class cabin on a meme Titanic. The service is nicer, the room is bigger, and the ship is still moving, but the ocean around it has changed.
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.