Long Pump, Short Human Nature: Debating Pump.Fun at an 8B Market Cap

Original Title: "Long Pump, Short Human Nature - Debating the Great Pump Fun at 8B Market Cap"

Original Author: Crypto Weituo, Crypto KOL

In July, I faced FUD across the entire network as the number one Pump scholar in the Chinese community, got cursed for two months, and was blocked by thousands.

In the middle, I kept opening long positions, getting stopped out, re-entering, getting stopped out again, all while enduring huge losses—"spot doesn't scare me." $Pump is the most painful coin I've held in large positions over two years. Now, finally, everywhere is "the great scholar debates," "the light boat has passed ten thousand mountains," and so on. I won't say those arrogant things like "I told you so."

In my view, the issues raised by Wizard about the Pump live-streaming game, as well as most of the Chinese community's discussions about Pump's model and moat, are essentially about understanding Pump's audience.

TL;DR

- Pump's biggest advantage is that it understood earlier than anyone else that this generation of young people is the "PVP generation";

- Pump is mass media based on the values of the PVP generation, equivalent to Truth Social and Bluesky;

- The game of live-streaming coins is no different from other coins; it should be understood from the perspective of track and ecosystem;

- The reason Pump must do live-streaming coins is to seize Taker traffic from trading platforms;

- The fundamental reason I am a Pump maxi is my deep understanding of the darkness of human nature and the inevitable chaos of the world;

Understanding the PVP Generation

For any project, the truly decisive factor is the audience.

Pump's greatest moat is its audience, which is what I called the "PVP generation" in Open Source Sickle 23, those born after 2005.

Why?

The moats we used to talk about—liquidity, technology, compliance barriers, etc.—are all based on the economic assumption of the "rational man": individuals in economic activities are self-interested, able to rationally weigh pros and cons, and pursue the maximization of their own economic interests at the lowest cost. BTC mining games, DeFi, token economic models, etc., are all based on this premise.

Of course, in practice, not everyone is a saint. Rationality is institutionalized; as long as those with discourse power among economic participants are "rational," these models basically still hold.

The problem is here: the PVP generation is the first generation to grow up under the discourse power of social media.

The characteristics of this generation are:

- Unlike our generation, they did not experience struggles for basic needs in childhood; they are well-off;

- The influence of "irrational amplifiers" like social media far outweighs rational education for them;

- In most countries, this generation has never experienced overall economic growth like their parents; instead, due to technological substitution and industrial transfer, job opportunities have sharply decreased;

The result is that their cognitive style is "irrational," based on labels rather than rational analysis.

Moreover, the smartest among them are much more likely to enter zero-sum industries, including finance, real estate, entertainment, and other service industries. The essence of these industries is to take money from others' pockets and put it in their own, dividing the pie rather than making the pie bigger.

If you don't believe it, look at the past 10 years: aren't China's most profitable companies all turning to finance? Aren't a large number of highly educated people doing live streaming and becoming internet celebrities? In the US, aren't most young people left-leaning, not thinking about "making America great again" like the right (making the pie), but rather "social justice warrior" (dividing the pie)?

Zero-sum, to the previous generation, meant cutting leeks; to this generation, it's the new normal. So it's meaningless to judge them by the old universal morality and value logic.

They are indifferent to survival issues; their understanding of achievement is "how many followers I have," "how I go viral," rather than, like their parents, how to build a "business." They even despise their parents' values.

In terms of behavior, this generation lacks professionalism but is highly action-oriented, knows how to "attract attention" with purpose, hates being judged even a little, and has extremely low tolerance for delayed feedback—they can't stand delayed gratification.

The Core Moat of Pump

Pump's success mainly comes from understanding the needs of the PVP generation:

- No moral judgment

- Ultra-timely feedback and stimulation

- Low threshold

The latter two are solved through product features, which many people say "have no moat."

So the core awesomeness of Pump is in shaping a value system that doesn't stick to traditional moral judgments. As long as you win and grab attention, you're awesome. Pump will never pretend to tell you "community first," "long-term value," "the team has vision," and so on, like other projects.

Even if you rug like $Quant kid or $HANDS no-hands guy, the official and community accounts will just turn you into a new meme and clip you into a video. There's no such thing as rights protection in Pump.

There are also all kinds of news coins, political coins (even so-called "dead coins"), which might be censored on other platforms or even on Twitter itself, let alone monetized. But on Pump Fun, anything goes.

Whether it's PVP generation devs or trench warriors, they hate being front-run or rugged, but they hate being lectured even more, being told that what they're participating in is "a scam, a beastly act, cutting leeks." For the incels of the PVP generation, trench business is trench business, but being denied in values is a physiological disgust.

Whether you like it or not, values are the foundation of mass media.

It's like how right-wing boomers hated being silenced on Twitter during Jack Dorsey's era, so they went to Truth Social; left-wing boomers hated Musk's X for being Farcist Rhetorics, so they went to Bluesky. People choose their own echo chambers based on their values. The PVP generation thinks all you boomers are idiots, so they chose PumpFun.

If you ask why I understand this so well, maybe it's because "birth understands birth."

Pump Live-Streaming Coin Game

Last year, chatting with friends, I was clearly optimistic about live-streaming coins and believed it was the only track last year that hadn't been falsified (Pump was interrupted due to rectification, not because it couldn't continue live-streaming). This was also the main reason I supported @Sidekick_Labs at the time.

Of course, the question Wizard asked earlier is also very representative: in web2, it's tipping, so streamers are motivated to keep streaming to make money. In web3, the streamer buys at the bottom, streams for a while, then dumps—why keep streaming? For trading fees? If a lot go to zero, doesn't the game keep moving forward? Does the market cap keep getting lower?

First, his game theory deduction is correct, but that's from the perspective of a specific coin. If it's a track, you need to think the other way: if it's not live-streaming, is it any different?

Whether it's previous AI, Bonk's CTO, Solana's ICM, or even not limited to on-chain launches, including exchange VC coins, devs always have an unfair advantage and can dump and leave at any time.

The only things that affect whether the team abandons the project are the upfront cost and whether there's continuous cash flow. The higher the upfront cost and the more continuous cash income, the less likely the project team is to abandon it. When I retweeted the Pump video on July 9, I said this about Pump itself. At the time, I was flamed, and a bunch of people thought Alon was a beast so Pump would definitely rug.

Looking back now, isn't that how it is? Similarly, if a streamer rugs once, it's basically impossible to stream a second time—one-shot deal. But what if, like Bagwork, he keeps earning creator fee cash? Why would he kill a cash cow?

Second, the live-streaming industry in web2 is an industrialized system; streamers are just the face (from the memecoin perspective), but the real driving force is buying traffic, finding big backers, and the guilds and arms dealers behind the scenes who launder money. The streamer doesn't get much in hand.

It's the same for live-streaming coins; the coin's success mainly depends on MM. The streamer is unlikely to be MM, so Pump is responsible for attracting wannabes, and MM takes on the guild's role.

There are two points here:

- The casino's biggest profit isn't from gambling itself, but from turnover. The ratio is about 1:9;

- For ICM or AI application coin narratives, as MM you need to control a team; for live-streaming coins, you only need to control one person.

Why Must Pump Do Live-Streaming Coins?

This is Pump's wisest decision.

The lifeblood of traffic on the entire Solana chain is not on the platforms, but on the trading platforms, on Axiom.

Solana can systematically smear Pump, encourage VC funds to support Bonk or other platforms, and push Useless, but cash flow and attention are two different things. Whether users trade Bonk or Pump coins, it's all through Axiom. No matter what story you tell, it's all the same CA.

But live-streaming is different. The content of the live stream is directly transmitted to the K-line. Placing orders while watching the stream gives an asymmetric information advantage over just watching the Axiom K-line. And live-streaming isn't a specific narrative; it's a traffic carrier itself. The order volume will truly tilt toward Pump.

So the key data for the next stage is whether the order volume on Pump's front end can seize Axiom's market share, not the ratio between Pump and other platforms.

Why Did I Support Pump So Early

For quite a while, I was almost the only Pump Maxi in the Chinese community. If you must ask why:

1. I have led Dev teams myself;

2. I have run a launchpad myself but failed, so I understood why I and other launchpads on Solana would fail, and witnessed Pump's awesomeness;

3. I got to know Pump's early investors early on, gained first-hand insight, and witnessed the Pump team's working style and logic up close;

4. I spent a lot of time with young people;

5. I've run projects for 10 years; maybe I'm not an expert in secondary markets, but I understand human nature, especially its darkness. My fundamental understanding of the world is that it moves toward chaos, and chaos is a ladder;

6. As I said, the Pump team are sharks, conquerors reading Napoleon on the toilet.