At 4 AM today, co-founder of pump.fun @a1lon9 participated in a voice interview live stream on the Twitch channel of crypto KOL @notthreadguy.

Before the live stream, in the English-speaking community, some joked that this was the "FOMC" of the crypto world. As it turned out, this live stream indeed had a profound impact on the price of $PUMP, which dropped nearly 15% during the stream, with a daily drop of almost 20%, and briefly fell below a $30 billion market cap.

For pump.fun, alon's interview was undoubtedly a public relations disaster.

What did alon say in the live stream?

About the $PUMP Airdrop

threadguy: Will there be another $PUMP airdrop? If so, when?

alon: As we promised at the TGE, $PUMP will have an airdrop, and we will keep our promise. We want to reward the community that helped us grow over the past one and a half years. We hope the airdrop is executed well and can drive transaction volume across the entire ecosystem, which is very important for us. We are now focused on bringing attention and hype back to pump.fun. That said, the airdrop will not happen soon (in the immediate future).

Many rumors about the $PUMP airdrop, such as the airdrop criteria or the airdrop activities, but I think only no more than five people on Earth know how the $PUMP airdrop is actually planned. Therefore, all the rumors you see are unreliable. We take the airdrop very seriously and hope it is worthy of the community.

threadguy: How much of the $PUMP will be used for the airdrop?

alon: I cannot reveal it right now, but it will be worthy of the community.

threadguy: How will the selling pressure after the airdrop be addressed?

alon: I cannot reveal any specific mechanisms right now, but we will consider them carefully.

About the $PUMP Buyback

threadguy: Will you continue to buy back $PUMP from the open market?

alon: I cannot fully disclose the specific plan, but our on-chain actions will answer this question.

threadguy: Can you reveal how much $PUMP you have bought back since the TGE?

alon: Initially, we bought back approximately $20 million worth of $PUMP, and in the past four days, it was around $550,000. (After hearing that threadguy said twice, "You have a lot of money!")

About Competition from Bonk

threadguy: Why do you think Bonk has been able to surpass pump.fun's trading volume and market share in such a short time?

alon: Of course, there are many short-term hype and short-term competitive strategies, but we always focus on the long term. I mean, in the past few months, the products used by everyone haven't changed substantially, and the market hasn't seen substantial growth either. If we want this field to grow 10 times or even 100 times, some substantial changes are needed.

Although long-term is important, short-term is also crucial for long-term development. We will inject a lot of liquidity into our ecosystem and interact with the communities that are actively building within our ecosystem, ensuring these communities have the best opportunities to succeed.

threadguy: How can pump.fun regain absolute leadership in the "launchpad war"?

alon: In the short term, supporting active communities within the current ecosystem is essential. It's these active communities that have brought us here. However, if we look at a longer timeline, besides helping the tokens launched on our platform succeed, we need more significant product improvements. I think everyone remembers the booming market at the end of last year and the beginning of this year. Although crypto has cycles, the current downturn, apart from cyclical factors, change is also necessary.

We need a better ecosystem and mechanism that can effectively coordinate the forces of the community, creators, and traders; we need a better way to bring people outside the industry into this field; we need meme coins to have more new and interesting narratives rather than the same group of people repeatedly hyping things that have already made people tired. For the first point, we have already invested a lot of time and effort. For the second, the pump.fun mobile app was created for this purpose. For the third, we need to continuously invest resources to attract better creators.

But let me emphasize again: focusing on the short term and directing all resources back to pump.fun is indispensable for long-term development.

threadguy: Is your strategy of buying one pump.fun ecosystem meme coin every day viable and effective in the long run?

alon: This is just a small step in our plan.

About the Meme Market

threadguy: Do you think the meme market will return to its previous peak?

alon: Of course, if I didn't believe the market could grow tenfold or even a hundredfold, I wouldn't be here. The market still has a lot of potential upwards, it's just a matter of time and specific actions. But I think we need a more sustainable way to attract users. Explosive growth is definitely attractive, but after excessive hype, the crash may cause new users who were attracted to leave, and they might never come back due to a bad impression.

Many big changes are needed to achieve sustainable growth.

threadguy: What will you specifically do?

alon: First, what we are currently building is not a single launchpad product, but a large pump.fun ecosystem. So we need excellent teams. The current team is already good, but we will continue to recruit talent, including strategic acquisitions like Kolscan that we announced earlier. We will continue to observe the market and look for opportunities to expand, whether in social media or other areas.

Then, as I've mentioned before, we need major changes. One of the major changes will be PumpSwap 2.0. I can't reveal too many details, but the fee structure will be completely different, aimed at incentivizing teams that can produce more interesting meme coins to join and build long-term. The CTO incentives we updated a week ago have already laid the foundation, which can motivate creators to build within existing meme coin communities.

Whether it's creators, broadcasters, artists, or startup founders, we try to attract them into our ecosystem. Not just to deploy a token and hype it for a few days and then leave, but to inspire them to build something sustainable. We still need a lot of efforts and iterations to achieve this.

The mobile app is very important. Although our user numbers have fluctuated recently, the number of users and activity on the app have been setting new highs almost every day, making it easier for newcomers to get involved and familiarize themselves with the space.

Live streams are also a key focus for us. How to have information dissemination determined by the market rather than algorithms controlled by social media companies? That's also our long-term vision.

threadguy also asked some other questions, such as how pump.fun avoids becoming the OpenSea of the meme coin sector, and whether they will sign non-crypto broadcasters.

But none of these matters anymore, because the result of this live stream was to once again ignite players' anger toward pump.fun, resulting in a near 20% drop in $PUMP.

Why was this a PR disaster?

Perhaps from alon's perspective, this wasn't a "public relations" move targeting recent dissatisfaction with pump.fun, but rather a "promotion" to a broader audience, which is why he chose to accept the live stream interview with threadguy on Twitch. However, the result was that even the fact that he didn't conduct the interview on his own live streaming platform became one of the points of frustration for the players.

After the TGE, $PUMP briefly rose and then started to fall, which left players who were originally on pump.fun's side speechless. Even more absurdly, alon himself publicly bought and supported five meme coins in the pump.fun ecosystem, and four of them in his portfolio have already experienced losses.

When alon first bought the pump.fun ecosystem meme coin $neet, the token instantly reached a $30 million market cap, with a 365% one-minute bullish candle. People thought this would be a good start, especially those who have always believed that pump.fun still has the most interesting meme coin culture, and these narratives would surely improve. However, the result was that alon did not continue to pump the price, and the emotional buying quickly ran out. $neet has returned to the market cap level when alon bought it, and the effect of the subsequent tokens alon bought has become weaker and weaker.

This makes alon's statement in the live stream about "injecting a lot of liquidity into the ecosystem" seem extremely hard to believe and ironic. It even became free advertising for the competitor Bonk:

Bonk immediately announced that it would allocate 1% of platform revenue to support its top meme coins during the live stream.

The fact that the $PUMP airdrop will not happen soon also ignited players' anger again. Even one of the biggest streamers on pump.fun, gainzy, criticized it in his live stream:

Some make money, others lose money. Like Hyperliquid, giving loyal users six or seven-digit airdrops, they are happy and get their money back, and will continue trading on Hyperliquid. Especially in the current Bitcoin all-time high situation, everyone needs more money, even smaller airdrop shares are better than dragging on. If the airdrop doesn't meet expectations, pump.fun will face greater pressure and struggle to recover.

Who cares about streamers and creators in the trenches? It's the trenches that made pump.fun rich. You need to make these people rich, which is not difficult to understand.

Plus, alon's answers throughout the interview were full of "I can't reveal this" and "I can't reveal that," which deepened the distrust among players when their trust in pump.fun was almost gone—was it really not possible to reveal, or are you guys so indifferent after having $1 billion?

Conclusion

If alon's resolve in the live stream can still be verified over time, one thing is definitely no longer waitable — pump.fun, which has $1 billion, really needs a better public relations team.