Within the first vital pivot away from memecoin roots, memecoin launchpad Pump.enjoyable is launching a brand new funding arm aimed toward backing promising startups.
Pump.enjoyable introduced Monday that it’s launching a Pump Fund in parallel with a $3 million hackathon. The fund will finance 12 initiatives valued at $10 million and costing $250,000 every.
He added that the funding arm will “work long-term with initiatives” that do not essentially need to be crypto-related, and can present steering from Pump.enjoyable’s founders.
The challenge was spurred by the meme coin buying and selling frenzy on the time and comes as Pump.enjoyable’s buying and selling quantity has declined from its highs in early 2025.
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Pump.enjoyable mentioned its new funding arm will fund initiatives of “all ranges of maturity, business, and traction,” with a give attention to groups that “ship rapidly (and) overtly talk their plans.”
“We are going to assess the long-term viability of the challenge aside from product and social traction,” it added.
The hackathon, which lasts 30 days, permits members to create tokens, share updates on their initiatives, and let the market act as a choose of whether or not a challenge is profitable.
“As an alternative of pleasing judges and enterprise capitalists with cash, tokenization permits the market to grow to be the choose,” Pump.enjoyable mentioned. “It’s the customers who’re betting on you early and funding you.”
Demand for “nice founders” stays extremely excessive
Pump.enjoyable co-founder Aron Cohen instructed X that the variety of crypto developments over the previous three years “demonstrates that the demand for nice founders by merchants and long-term traders is extremely excessive, no matter market situations.”
He added that initiatives have began issuing tokens as a result of “customers appreciated shopping for into novel concepts they thought had an opportunity of success,” and there have been tens of millions of “potential customers and traders.”
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“Immediate liquidity meant you may get funded too,” Cohen mentioned, which led to the emergence of synthetic intelligence initiatives in cryptocurrencies and “confirmed each builders and merchants how massive this chance to tokenize early-stage initiatives might be.”
Pump.enjoyable buying and selling quantity declines from excessive degree
Pump.enjoyable’s buying and selling quantity has been declining since its peak in late 2024 and early 2025.
In accordance with Token Terminal, Pump.enjoyable’s month-to-month buying and selling quantity reached a file excessive of $11.75 billion in January 2025, reaching the milestone only one yr after its launch.
Month-to-month buying and selling volumes have steadily declined since then, with the platform reaching $2.43 billion in buying and selling quantity in December as speculative belongings like meme cash grew to become much less fascinating for merchants amid a tumultuous yr for the broader market.
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