Pump.fun, the wildly popular Solana-based platform that lets anyone launch a meme coin or token in seconds, made headlines on January 20 by officially launching its own investment arm: Pump Fund.
The announcement, shared via an animated video thread on X, came paired with an ambitious debut initiative—a $3 million “Build in Public” (BiP) Hackathon (or contest) that is designed to upend traditional startup funding models.
In classic Pump.fun style, this is not the average startup contest with slick pitch decks and stern-faced judges. This is what it entails:
- Total pot of the contest: $3 million in funding.
- Winners: 12 projects will each score $250,000 in investment.
- Starting valuation: Each funded project gets pegged at $10 million right away.
- Extra perks: Direct mentorship from Pump.fun’s founders, plus platform support to help winners grow.
What is the real game-changer? Winners will not go through the traditional selection process. For winning, the rules are refreshingly straightforward and market-driven:
- Teams apply and launch their token on Pump.fun (if they don’t have one already).
- They have to build themselves in the public domain, sharing every step openly (via posts on X, live streams, community updates, etc.).
- They must hold at least 10% of their token supply themselves.
- Success isn’t decided by experts. The market and real community do the judging: whoever builds genuine hype, attracts supporters, drives token engagement, and shows real momentum wins the funding.
It’s open to pretty much anything—crypto projects, non-crypto ideas, early concepts, or even more mature ones.
Applications kicked off on January 19, 2026, with a deadline of February 18. The first winners could be announced within approximately 30 days after key milestones are reached.
In short, Pump.fun is betting big on a crowd-powered future for funding: prove you can rally real people, build openly, and create buzz that actually moves the needle, and the money (and mentorship) will follow. No gatekeepers, and no closed-door deals
Can This Model Be Successful?
People in the industry are not totally convinced about the project. Musheer Ahmed, who runs Finstep Asia, says the fund needs clearer rules around governance and how it distributes money. Otherwise, Pump.fun’s team may exhibit partiality.
Ahmed pointed out something pretty fundamental: traditional VC committees judge founders and teams subjectively, sure, but Pump.fun claims it will go purely on organic traction. The problem? They need serious verification to make sure the engagement is real and not just bots or fake accounts pumping up the numbers.
Pratik Kala at Apollo Crypto thinks the concept has potential. He compared it to prediction markets, which indicate that when people are genuinely excited about something, community participation tends to be high. But he’s worried about token economics, as plenty of projects have used tokens to bootstrap themselves and then funneled the money into private equity structures that shut token holders out completely.
“For this to succeed, there has to be transparency and a look-through on the project’s success and dollars flowing back to tokenholders,” Kala noted. He cites the example of LaunchCoin, which tried something similar last year and flopped hard.
Timing Could Not Be Worse
This announcement comes while Pump.fun is trying to clean up its image after a rough stretch. The platform had to pause livestreaming earlier this year after people broadcast animal cruelty and self-harm content. They are also dealing with a class action lawsuit claiming Baton Corp., their parent company, ran an illegal securities exchange by letting 50,000 unregistered tokens get issued while pocketing nearly $500 million in fees.
The platform’s riding high on having launched over 14 million tokens and pulling in more than $1 billion in revenue across its first two years, though trading volumes have dropped significantly from their January 2025 peak of $11.75 billion down to $2.43 billion by December.
