Pump.fun Goes All In: Offering $30,000 Monthly Salary to Compete with FOMO for 'Trading Influencers'

Original Title: "$20,000 Signing Bonus + $30,000 Monthly Salary, Behind Pump.fun's Attempt to Poach FOMO"
Original Author: Golem, Odaily Planet Daily

The current Meme market is highly fragmented, with little overlap between overseas users and Chinese users in terms of blockchain ecosystems or trading tools. This fragmentation not only diverts global Meme funds into various ecosystems but also leaves even the gossip unclear.

On August 8, a rumor about "Pump.fun spending big to poach competitors" went viral in overseas Meme communities.

Initially revealed by overseas user CLR, it was stated that Pump.fun is using incentive programs to attract users to migrate from the FOMO platform to Pump.fun. According to the disclosed agreement, Pump.fun plans to offer a one-time signing bonus of $20,000 to eligible users and pay a fixed monthly salary of $30,000. The agreement requires signed users to transfer their funds and trading positions from the FOMO platform to Pump.fun; use a new wallet that has not been used on other platforms as their exclusive wallet; bind their X account to the Pump.fun wallet; publicly declare that wallet as their only public wallet on their X homepage; and permanently delete and close their FOMO platform account.

Additionally, users must meet real trading requirements, including completing at least $25,000 in trading volume on Pump.fun each month (or 25% of their previous average monthly trading volume on the FOMO platform). It is evident that Pump.fun is willing to spend significantly to capture users from the FOMO platform.

Full Agreement Content Translated (Source: 0xAA)

From a business perspective, this is a normal competitive behavior among companies and poses no legal issues. In entertainment platforms or user-centric business models, companies often pay KOLs or influential users to leave competitor platforms and maintain exclusivity on their own. This competitive model is also quite common domestically, such as in the early days of short video live streaming platforms, where Douyin, Kuaishou, Bilibili, and Huya offered exorbitant exclusive contracts to internet celebrities.

However, the initial confusion for onlookers is, who is FOMO?

Pump.fun is the largest token issuance platform overseas, consistently ranking among the top five in fee revenue on blockchain protocol lists. What could have prompted it to poach users from the FOMO platform? What allure does the FOMO platform possess that makes it a formidable business competitor for Pump.fun? Odaily Planet Daily will analyze the undercurrents and significant changes in the current overseas Meme market through this "gossip."

FOMO Has Become the Main Meme Trading Platform for Users

FOMO is a multi-chain Meme trading platform, offering services similar to GMGN. Launched in May 2025, it has only been operational for a little over a year, but according to RootData, FOMO has completed three rounds of financing, raising a total of $94 million, with a valuation exceeding $550 million.

FOMO primarily serves the overseas Meme community and promotes mobile trading, with most users in the Chinese region likely never having heard of FOMO. More shockingly, this platform, which you may have never heard of or used, has already surpassed Uniswap and Phantom in revenue over the past 30 days, with its Trading Bot market share overtaking GMGN to become number one in the market.

According to DeFiLama data, FOMO's revenue in the past 30 days was $8.17 million, although it still lags behind GMGN and Axiom, it has surpassed mainstream Launchpads on Phantom, Uniswap, and Robinhood (Flap and Pons).

Meanwhile, according to Dune data, as of the time of publication, FOMO's total fees reached $30.39 million. As shown in the chart below, FOMO's fees began to experience rapid growth starting in July, averaging over $200,000 daily, whereas previously it maintained an average of $10. As of the time of publication, FOMO set a new daily fee record of $556,000 on August 6.

Entering August, FOMO continued to maintain high growth. As of August 8, FOMO's market share in Trading Bots had risen to 43%, surpassing GMGN to become the market leader, which had previously held the top spot.

How significant is FOMO's influence now? A recent example illustrates this well. On August 4, the Solana Meme coin CATE experienced a flash crash of 65% within a minute, with its market cap plummeting from over $80 million to about $20 million. The community summarized two reasons: first, CATE's X account was banned, and second, FOMO went down, preventing users from trading during the downtime. Of course, this incident remains controversial, and interested readers can explore further.

Regardless of the truth, this incident underscores FOMO's current influence within the Meme ecosystem. So, from a product perspective, what allows FOMO to stand out among numerous competitors?

The answer lies in FOMO's product design. The core services provided by FOMO are similar to most Meme trading platforms, but its slogan is "the only social-first trading application." This is reflected in the product through the introduction of a profit leaderboard and a news feed providing alerts on top traders' activities.

FOMO's LEADERBOARD and FEED on the platform

The Meme market inherently has a strong worship of wealth; as long as one earns enough, they can be called "smart money" and attract a large following and copy trading accounts. FOMO capitalizes on this group characteristic, artificially creating idols and using leaderboards and other pages to highlight high-profit users, helping them gain influence. FOMO team member @villagebythexyz stated on August 9 on the X platform that compared to previous cycles, anyone with some influence in the cryptocurrency field must become an excellent trader, emphasizing that "trading shapes your followers, not the other way around."

This model has achieved tremendous success. For instance, the reason Solana Meme coin CATE surged was not due to its narrative being appealing, but because of the traffic and support from a figure known as "Little Ansem" Poorgoat. Poorgoat is a member of the FOMO Hall of Fame (recognized by FOMO for achieving significant profits), and thus, even though CATE lacks an appealing narrative, it was still able to create a "myth" amidst the crowd of fans.

Pump.fun has also recognized the immense potential of this model for platform growth. On August 7, the Pump.fun APP announced a social feature upgrade, which primarily replicates FOMO's social functions. Now, upon entering the Pump.fun homepage, users see not just a flood of new Meme coin information but also news feeds and operation monitoring pushes from Meme traders/KOLs.

Pump.fun Homepage

Pump.fun founder Alon has recently been actively posting welcoming several overseas Meme traders/KOLs to join the Pump.fun app. To attract more well-known overseas Meme traders to the Pump.fun platform, Pump.fun has even begun to poach from FOMO, requiring Meme traders to sign "exclusivity agreements."

Imran, co-founder of Alliance, stated on the X platform that the competition between Pump and FOMO could become a significant driving force for on-chain finance to enter the mainstream market. The competition between the two platforms will push on-chain finance from the niche area of Crypto Twitter to products aimed at the general consumer.

However, fundamentally, Pump.fun's competitive behavior reflects that the overseas Meme market has entered a "celebrity-driven sales model"; whoever signs the most KOLs with strong trading capabilities will dominate the market.

Overseas Meme Market Enters Celebrity-Driven Sales Model

From FOMO's rise to Pump.fun's poaching behavior, it is evident that the overseas Meme market is undergoing a significant transformation: the core of market competition is no longer about issuance tools, trading speed, or on-chain liquidity, but rather the competition for "attention resources."

As the cultural consensus and celebrity coin narratives that the early Meme coin market relied on begin to fail, the Meme market shifts its attention from the Meme coins themselves to the individuals trading Meme coins. FOMO's rapid growth logic is based on this shift in market dynamics. In this model, traders have replaced Memes as the new content subjects, and platforms package the originally fragmented on-chain trading behaviors into a content flow similar to entertainment consumption, with people becoming the new carriers of consensus.

For many retail investors lacking professional analytical skills, following a trader who has previously made a million dollars is clearly simpler than researching a newly born Meme project with no historical records.

However, this trend also means that the Meme market is entering a more competitive phase. When trading traffic and market attention concentrate on a few top traders, competition between platforms will naturally shift from user acquisition to competing for "super nodes" that can bring in users, namely Meme influencers.

This is strikingly similar to the early battles for streamers in the domestic short video live streaming industry. At that time, platforms like Douyin, Kuaishou, Huya, and Douyu competed for top streamers through high signing fees, fundamentally vying for attention entry points. The difference is that the competition among top streamers in the short video live streaming industry occurred in a rapidly expanding emerging market, where user scale and commercial value were still in a growth phase, ultimately driving the live streaming industry toward maturity.

The emergence of a similar competitive model in the Meme market reflects a completely different signal.

As platforms begin to compete for the same batch of "trading influencers," the winner may achieve short-term growth, but it also means that the entire Meme track is losing the vitality initially formed by community culture and spontaneous dissemination. This poses the greatest risk for Memes.

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