Pump.fun closes Pandora's box: profit-seeking leads to unscrupulous live streaming

Author: Climber, Golden Finance

On November 26, in response to the recent crypto community feedback that Pump.fun's live broadcast content involves various sensitive illegal themes, such as violence, drug abuse, pornography, etc. The platform finally issued an announcement stating that it will suspend the live streaming function on the website indefinitely until the audit infrastructure is ready.

However, Pump.fun has been open for half a year, with a total deployment of more than 3.8 million tokens. In November, the platform's revenue from live broadcast traffic doubled compared to the previous month. During this period, the platform's live broadcast content also went from the initial edge to serious anti-humanity, and it was not until the community KOL reflected that it attracted widespread attention. It has to be said that human nature will also disappear under profit-seeking.

1. Out-of-control live broadcast platform

At the end of May this year, Pump.fun launched the live broadcast function. Ordinary users can issue coins like the previous meme coin creation process, and then just click the "Create Live" button just above the price chart to start live broadcasting to achieve meme goods.

However, it was this ultra-low threshold video live-streaming coin-issuing model that laid the hidden danger for the platform's content to get out of control in the future, but Pump.fun at that time failed to formulate norms and guidelines in advance to constrain it.

Then in August, Pump.fun continued to provide more functions for live-streaming. First, it launched unlimited Threads and live-streaming real-time chat, and then launched a live-streaming function called "Stages". This function allows multiple people to broadcast live at the same time, share screens and voice chat. This also makes the Pump.fun platform more like "TikTok and Kuaishou".

The guiding event that really caused the platform's content to slide out of control was the official traffic promotion behavior of Pump.fun to video bloggers.

On November 22, an unemployed young man in North America started a live broadcast on Pump.fun and said that he would wait until the market value of his token (LIVE) reached 100m before going offline. After the live broadcast was selected by Pump officials and placed on the homepage, the LIVE token rose all the way. Later, KOLs such as gmony participated in the real-time online interaction and eventually pushed the market value of the LIVE token to over 20 million US dollars.

In the end, the successful model of this initiator attracted countless followers, and the content of the live broadcast gradually became bottomless. From suicide threats, animal abuse to pornography, the subject matter involved is becoming more and more anti-human.

A post by an X user showed that a child in the Pump.fun live broadcast room threatened to kill his family if the token price did not reach the target market value of $60,000.

Another video blogger said that if the price of his memecoin did not rise as expected, he would shoot at the school.

The live broadcast title in the above picture shows the video blogger's tendency to abuse dogs.

The above cases are just the tip of the iceberg. There are many videos involving drug abuse, pornography, homosexuality and other criminal themes. This has also attracted more and more people's attention, and called on Pump.fun to regulate the content of the platform or even stop the live broadcast room.

However, the launch of Pump.fun's video live broadcast function has indeed brought considerable profits to the platform.

According to Dune data, as of the time of writing, Pump.fun has accumulated revenue of more than US$250 million and has deployed a total of approximately 3.87 million tokens.

According to the data from the DeFilama platform, as of now, Pump.fun's revenue in November has reached 75.44 million US dollars, far exceeding the historical high of 30.5 million US dollars set in October.

2. Pump.fun presses the pause button

The income brought by pump.fun from memes and even video live streaming was originally understandable, but the loss of control of the platform's content has triggered widespread criticism and accusations from members of the crypto community, and even called for stricter review or the closure of the live broadcast function.

Pudgy Penguins security project manager Beau posted that some users used Pump.fun live broadcasts to make threats, such as committing suicide if a certain token did not reach the set market value. This behavior is absolutely outrageous, and such inappropriate live broadcasts need to be taken offline. Please turn off the live broadcast function, the situation has gotten out of control.

This call has also attracted the attention and discussion of many well-known KOLs including ZachXBT, and Pump.fun founder Alon also responded.

Alon acknowledged the community's concerns, but also defended the platform's audit work. He said that the platform has always attached importance to content review and has a 24-hour audit team and technical support team. However, the community demands more transparent measures and the immediate closure of the live broadcast function until an effective content review mechanism is implemented. At present, Pump.fun has not yet clarified whether it will adjust the live broadcast function or strengthen security measures.

However, as the incident continued to ferment and the live broadcast content on the platform became more and more distorted, pump.fun finally made the decision to shut down the live broadcast function.

On November 26, pump.fun officially issued a community announcement stating that from the beginning, they had taken a firm regulatory stance on improper behavior. This includes proactively deleting token images, names, descriptions, comments, marking any NSFW content, deleting live broadcasts, and recently deleting videos.

Pump.fun said that its platform has recently experienced unprecedented growth, with the number of daily live broadcasts increasing by more than 100 times in less than a week, while hundreds of streamers are shut down every day to maintain the security and integrity of the content seen by the community.

In order to ensure the absolute safety of users, the live streaming function on the website will be suspended indefinitely until the review infrastructure is ready to cope with high levels of activity.

In addition, Pump.fun said that it will release guidelines to make the rules and regulations of website use more transparent, and will provide creators and users with greater visibility of personal audit decisions to ensure that everyone understands the process and results.

Regarding the out-of-control incident of live broadcast content on the pump.fun platform, a legal expert warned that Pump.fun's extreme content could trigger criminal investigations and civil lawsuits.

Its live broadcast function seems to have become a platform for developers to broadcast extreme shocking content to promote their tokens-according to legal experts, this may lead to civil or criminal lawsuits.

After Pump.fun disabled the live broadcast function, related tokens fell. Among them, LIVE fell 20.11% in 24 hours and SHITCOIN fell 45.7% in 24 hours.

Summary

The Internet has the attribute of low threshold, and there will be no order without regulatory intervention. While Pump.fun opened Pandora's box and gave ordinary users the "alchemy", it forgot to regulate it, which also created the bottom line of greedy people. However, human community must be based on civilization after all, and any anti-human and anti-social content should be banned in time to avoid adverse consequences.