4 companies pump.fun could look at acquiring after its $1B raise
Acquisitions could help the memecoin platform own more of the trading stack
Pump.fun and PST Vector/Shutterstock and Adobe modified by Blockworks
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With pump.fun set to reportedly raise $1 billion via a token sale, it’s fair to assume the memecoin launchpad will at least be open to exploring acquisitions as a way of putting its fresh capital to work. Based on my own guesswork and a few conversations with industry watchers, here are four businesses I think could make sense for a pump.fun acquisition.
BullX
Many memecoin traders don’t actually trade through pump.fun’s frontend, opting for the sniping and copy trading features offered by trading bots — many of which run on Telegram.
These bots collect fees on trading volume, which can end up being quite lucrative. Blockworks Research estimated the gross annual revenue for Solana trading bots to have been between $500 million to $1 billion in 2024.
Pump.fun has, so far, been fine to coexist, but as the speculative trading game grows more crowded — and particularly with the entry of more put-together competitors like Axiom — pump will need to scheme out how it can win back some of those trading volumes.
BullX, a popular Solana Telegram bot that has drawn allegations of founder disinvolvement, could be a good takeover target.
DEX Screener
On top of sniping, another category where pump.fun loses users is in token discovery. Rather than trying to find their next buy through pump’s somewhat limited and clunky interface, traders have historically turned to platforms like DEX Screener that come with more fine-tuned data and tracking features for traders.
A major way DEX Screener makes money is by charging memecoin projects for a more souped-up page on the platform, and DeFiLlama counts it as having made over $100 million in revenue over the past year and change.
Pump.fun has already launched an “advanced” tab that offers DEX Screener-like features, but if it finds DEX Screener users too sticky to win over, it could make sense to just combine the two. It wouldn’t be the first time one went after the other’s users: DEX Screener released a memecoin launchpad called Moonshot that, well, hasn’t been much of a moonshot.
Titan
The majority of onchain Solana activity comes from memecoin trading and swaps between SOL and stablecoins, as Blockworks Research’s Carlos Gonzalez Campo has pointed out. Pump.fun is doing pretty well on the memecoin side of things, but likely few users are swapping USDC for SOL on pump.fun’s AMM.
Much of that volume goes to Jupiter, a DEX aggregator that algorithmically finds the best route for trades to travel to achieve the best possible price. It’s a valuable product, and even if a swap aggregator collects minimal fees, it could be a loss leader to draw users who may then convert to customers of more revenue-generating products.
One candidate here could be Titan, a newer Solana DEX aggregator that claims its swaps outperform Jupiter most of the time.
Cube Exchange
The best business in crypto is arguably still just running an exchange. If pump.fun had its own centralized exchange, it could access a lot more liquidity and likely diversify out from memecoins into other fields like perpetual futures, or even try to capture trading volume on new asset classes.
Pump.fun memes could also get expedited listings on the exchange, maintaining the platform’s edge against the likes of Coinbase and Binance, which are sometimes slower to list popular new memecoins. Pump could use the distribution from the exchange to drive interest in things like pump.fun livestreams.
Compared to some other targets, acquiring an exchange is an expensive proposition. Cube makes sense because its CEO is Solana-native, having previously worked at the foundation, and the exchange’s volume doesn’t tend to run as high as some competitors.
Backpack acquired FTX EU for $32.7 million earlier this year. Cube probably wouldn’t be that cheap, but pump is likely to have lots of cash.
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