Petina 🇦🇺

Creator fees need change. When Dynamic Fees V1 was introduced a few months ago, the goal was to help create more success cases in our ecosystem by giving top project founders and teams a strong incentive to launch their token on pump fun and drive it to success. Only a week later, the potential of the mechanism showed: more and more creators - many of which have never touched a crypto app before - began organically launching coins and streaming on the platform. The Streaming meta created some of the best onchain conditions of 2025, doubling activity by more than 2x, as evidenced by the below chart showing pump fun bonding curve volumes (in USD). However, it wasn’t sustainable, and it exposed critical issues within the platform. While creator fees are a game changer for Project Tokens (those with well-defined active teams, rather than communities) they failed to meaningfully change the behavior of the average memecoin token deployer. Therefore, creator fees may have skewed the incentive for users to engage in low-risk activity (coin creation) instead of high-risk activity (trading), which is dangerous, because traders are the lifeblood of the platform. Pump fun’s mission is to create the best possible environment for coins to thrive, and successful tokens are much more likely to come about in an environment where traders are incentivized to participate in the market, provide liquidity, create volume, and take risk. Furthermore, Creator Fees on the platform have lacked utility. Many narratives could use Creator Fees to raise the ceiling for that project by, for example, sending the fees to a notable person that is related to the narrative and onboard them to the community e.g. White Whale, rainbowfish, etc. The platform so far fails at providing a good user experience here, oftentimes requiring users to CTO coins, trust other people to fulfill their promises, etc. So, to summarize our analysis: - Creator Fees are a great tool to incentivize high-quality Project Tokens. Perhaps they require tweaking, and perhaps other protocol adjustments are needed to create an optimal environment for Project Tokens to thrive, but Dynamic Fees V1 was undoubtedly a directionally correct step for these kinds of token projects - Creator Fees can be used in a variety of ways to significantly improve the token’s investability but require better UX - Many tokens, however, don’t need Creator Fees, and this results in a more uneven playing field, where memecoin creation was incentivized too much instead of memecoin trading. Major changes are coming. I can’t say too much yet, but as always, pump fun will take a market-based approach, and let traders decide whether a narrative truly deserves Creator Fees, and how those should be used. There will be more communications coming from me soon about what we’re building and the future of $PUMP I’m extremely excited for what 2026 holds.