How Pump.fun Achieved a $500 Million ICO Raise in Just 12 Minutes

On July 12, 2025, Pump.fun – a platform for creating and trading memecoins on Solana – launched the ICO for its PUMP token. 125 billion tokens, representing 12.5% of the total supply, sold out within 12 minutes for $0.004 per token. This is one of the largest ICOs in crypto history for 2025. 

From One-Click Meme Factory to $700M Fees: Pump.fun’s Meteoric Rise

Launched in early 2024, Pump.fun quickly gained a reputation as the “one-click meme coin factory” on Solana. Users only needed to pay a small gas fee, enter their token name, and click a button to create their own coin with a minimal liquidity pool—no coding or audits required. This simplicity fueled rapid growth:

• Over 11 million tokens minted (Dune Analytics).
• Peak daily revenue of $7.1 million on January 23, 2025 (DefiLlama).
• Accumulated 4 million SOL in fees after one year, equivalent to more than $700 million.

From a product perspective, Pump.fun focuses on one thing: opening the door for the “fair-launch memecoin” trend, where anyone can create a coin, build a narrative, and wait for the market to decide. 

However, the community has revisited statements from founder Alon, who once criticized presales and exchange listings as “shady and benefiting insiders only,” which contrasts sharply with Pump.fun’s current approach. 

During the massive pre-sale of Pumpfun tokens, Pumpfun co-founder Alon’s comments on March 31, 2024 were widely forwarded in the community. He once said: The only upside to presales are that they allow you to pocket raised $$$ and Conclusion: every pre sale is a scam.… pic.twitter.com/iVKxTskV3g

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) July 9, 2025

The platform’s token, PUMP, launched via an ICO. This has raised questions within the crypto community about the choice of ICO and the actual outcome of the PUMP sale. Let’s explore those in today’s analysis.

A Blitz Sold-Out: 33% Supply on Six Exchanges, Gone in 12 Minutes

On July 12, 2025, Pump.fun publicly sold 125 billion PUMP tokens equivalent to 12.5% of the total supply at a fixed price of $0.004 on six exchanges (Bybit, Kraken, KuCoin, Bitget, Gate, MEXC) and its on-chain platform. Although the sale was planned to last three days, it sold out within just 12 minutes.

Source: icodrops

According to the allocation plan announced on July 9, 2025, the total supply of PUMP is 1 trillion tokens, distributed as follows:

• 33% sold through ICO (18% private sale, adjusted public sale from 15% to 12.5%)
• 24% for community programs and ecosystem development
• 20% allocated to the development team
• 13% for early investors
• Remaining 10% for ecosystem fund (2.4%), foundation (2%), livestreaming (3%), liquidity and exchanges (2.6%)

Source: Pump.fun

Initially, the ICO was announced to offer up to 15% of total supply, but the website adjusted the figure down to 12.5%, announcing a total raise of $500 million. 

Despite the ICO being scheduled until July 15, the tokens were sold out within 12 minutes, raising $500 million, making PUMP’s ICO the third largest in crypto history. When including the private sale (approximately $700 million raised), Pump.fun collected a total of $1.2 billion from the ICO event.

Source: Pump.fun

This places PUMP behind only EOS ($4.1 billion) and Telegram Open Network (TON) ($1.7 billion) in terms of ICO size.

Notably, all tokens sold in the ICO (including private sale) will be fully unlocked for trading within 48–72 hours, instantly pushing the circulating supply to 55% of the total supply, much higher than most projects that vest gradually. 

With over 55% of tokens circulating from the start, PUMP promises high liquidity right out of the gate, a rarity for ICO projects nowadays.

For more: Pump fun Deep Dive: Solana’s Meme Coins Launchpad, and PUMP Coin

On-Chain Data: Proof of Pump.fun’s Massive Pull

Of the $500 million raised, $448.5 million worth of PUMP was sold directly through the website presale. There were 10,145 wallets involved, out of 23,959 KYC-approved users—a buy rate of 42.3%. The average buy was about $44,000 per wallet. Breakdown of participants:

• 202 wallets bought $1M worth
• 138 wallets bought $500K+ worth
• 445 wallets bought $100K+ worth
• 290 wallets bought $50K+ worth
• 1,030 wallets bought $10K+ worth
• 545 wallets bought $5K+ worth
• 1,737 wallets bought $1K+ worth
• 5,758 wallets bought <$1K worth

Another $51.5 million was sold via the six CEXs, according to the project website.

Source: Dune

About 44% of the ICO purchased was from wallets funded in the last 24 hours.

Source: Blockworks

The complete participant list reveals that some addresses funded their wallets from CEXs like Binance, Bitget, Bybit, but also bridges such as deBridge.

Source: Blockworks

For more: Pump.fun’s Token Launch: A New Era or the Final Exit Liquidity?

PUMP token has been listed on Pre-market on many Exchanges

PUMP futures contracts were already available on several derivatives platforms like Hyperliquid, Coinbase International, Binance, and Phantom before the ICO. Right after the ICO launch, pre-market prices jumped from $0.005 to $0.007, currently trading around $0.0059 —46% higher than the public sale price.

Source: Hyperliquid

24-hour perpetual volumes are impressive:

The sharp price increase and strong leveraged volume show how heated the speculation remains, even before the token is officially unlocked for trading.

With this ICO, Pump.fun has proven its strong appeal within the crypto community and is set to continue drawing attention from investors moving forward.

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