AltcoinsRegulation
|3 min ReadPump.fun Whistleblower Leaks 15,000 Internal Chats to Court
Lucca Menezes
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
Alon Cohen has gone dark. The usually vocal COO of Pump.fun hasn't posted in over a month, and if you know how these legal battles work, you know that isn't a social media detox. It's his lawyers taping his mouth shut. While the retail crowd assumes Pump.fun is dying simply because volume collapsed 80%, I am looking at the court filings in the Southern District of New York. This isn't just a class action about lost money anymore. It has mutated into a RICO case that threatens to drag Solana Labs and Jito into the mud along with the casino operators.
From $231 Loss to Racketeering Charges
It is almost funny how this started. A single investor, Kendall Carnahan, sued over a $231 loss on the $PNUT token. Most founders would have settled that for pennies. Instead, the case expanded. Judge Colleen McMahon merged multiple lawsuits and appointed a new lead plaintiff who lost $242,000, giving the case real financial standing.
But the real escalation happened in July. The plaintiffs amended their complaint to include Solana Labs and Jito Labs as co-conspirators. The legal theory here is dangerous for the industry. They are arguing that these aren't just neutral service providers; they claim Pump.fun, Solana, and Jito form a single "racketeering enterprise" designed to extract value from retail through a rigged game. I view this as a direct attack on the "we just build the roads" defense that L1s have relied on for years.
The Smoking Gun: 15,000 Internal Logs
We usually dismiss these lawsuits as "ambulance chasing," but the evidentiary landscape shifted in September. A confidential informant flipped. This whistleblower handed over approximately 5,000 internal chat logs initially, followed by another 10,000 documents in October.
These aren't public tweets. These are allegedly internal communications between the teams at Pump.fun, Solana Labs, and Jito. The plaintiffs claim these logs prove active coordination to optimize the "casino" mechanics, specifically regarding MEV extraction. The accusation is that insiders used "Jito bundles" to front-run the so-called "Fair Launch" bonding curves, guaranteeing profit while retail provided the exit liquidity. If the logs confirm that Solana Labs engineers were helping fine-tune this extraction, the "neutral infrastructure" narrative collapses.
2026 Prediction: The End of Permissionless Infrastructure?
We are waiting for January 7, 2026. That is the deadline for the Second Amended Complaint, where these leaked chats will likely be detailed. My take is that this lawsuit will define the 2026 regulatory meta. If a court decides that an L1 foundation (Solana) and a middleware provider (Jito) are liable for the fraud committed on their protocols under RICO statutes, we will see a rapid pivot toward permissioned chains. Infrastructure providers will be forced to gatekeep their networks to survive, effectively killing the "permissionless" dream to save their own skins.
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