in one of them Strange fringes of the internet sit side by side, a unicorn with human breasts, a smoking cheetah and an animated Elon Musk in a traditional cape - it's the cast of One Bad Trip. There is a WordArt banner at the top of the page, floating in the air and out of place. Icons sparkle, sway, bounce, and otherwise evade chasing eyes. The nearly illegible message flashes in green, red and yellow before disappearing.

Yet behind this weird internet and lo-fi web design lies one of the fastest-growing cryptocurrency businesses of all time: Pump.Fun, a platform that launches memecoins, the A cryptocurrency whose value rises and falls with the popularity of the cryptocurrency. The memes it references.

The platform will be launched in January 2024. According to third-party reports, in the following 12 months, the platform brought in more than $350 million in revenue through a 1% transaction share.

Pump.Fun was founded by three entrepreneurs in their early twenties: Noah Tweedale, Alon Cohen and Dylan Kerler. The trio started out as memecoin traders but grew tired of repeatedly falling victim to "rug pulls" - a scam in which coin issuers steal funds and leave investors sitting on worthless tokens.

"Buying meme coins is a very unsafe thing to do...It's all about sucking money out of people," Tweeddale told Wired in an interview late last year. “The idea with Pump was to build something that puts everyone on the same playing field.”

Pump.Fun's three co-founders met in the UK and have tried to keep their identities secret - Tweedale and Cohen continue to be public under their respective online pseudonyms, Sapijiju and A1on, while Kerler has had little public connection to Pump.Fun. But their names appeared last year in company documents related to the operation.

Tweeddale agreed to meet with Wired on the condition that details of his whereabouts and appearances remain private. When we met, he came across as earnest but slightly nervous—and he spoke quickly. He declined to answer questions about where Pump.Fun operates out of its base or how many people it employs.

Tweeddale claimed that this secrecy partly reflects the prevailing attitude in the crypto community that the right to privacy is sacred. But he said it was also about "personal safety." In theory, the amount of cryptocurrency transferred through the Pump.Fun wallet could make the team a target for potential extortionists.

The aim, Tweeddale claims, is to make the founders more public-facing in the future. But at the same time, there's the question of how best to reinvest the funds Pump.Fun has acquired to strengthen and expand the platform in the face of increasing scrutiny and inevitable growing pains. "We're not here to make a quick buck, close the site, and run away. We want to build something lasting," Tweeddale said.

He claimed that the long-term vision is to transform Pump.Fun from a one-dimensional memecoin launchpad into a competitor to the largest social platforms, but with the majority of revenue flowing to users and creators. “Imagine Instagram or TikTok, where everything is investable,” Tweedale said. “Pump UI — everything we have so far — is the earliest version of what we want to do that you can imagine.”

Before Pump.Fun, relatively speaking Very few memecoins have entered the market; only Dogecoin (the original memecoin) and a handful of others (such as Shiba Inu, Pepe, and Bunker) have achieved some degree of prominence. The complexity of developing memecoins and the cost of providing the liquidity needed to make them easily tradable limits issuance.