On July 12, the ICO of the $500 million PUMP token from ”meme-coin factory” Pump.fun took place. The token sale was completed in 12 minutes, but users on several platforms encountered problems. According to the ICO website, only $51.5 million went through three centralized exchanges (CEXs). The main 89.7% of the token supply was purchased directly on Pump.fun. The sale was available on the following exchanges: Bitget Kraken ($30 million) Bybit MEXC KuCoin ($16.5 million) Gate ($5 million) Participants in the sale experienced delays in processing applications and were unable to receive their PUMP allocations. As a result, Kraken CEO Arjun Sethi announced an additional airdrop of the token for users affected by the technical glitch. The exchange's team will compile a list of customers and will send out notifications by email soon. Bybit users noted that even buy orders placed within the first nine or ten seconds of the sale did not go through. Bybit apologized for a glitch in processing API requests. ”Due to an unexpected API delay, there was an overload of requests: some users successfully received allocations, while others did not get them,” the exchange said. They assured that customers facing a similar situation will get a full refund. PUMP Implications and Numbers The meme-coin token sale was among the top three largest in the industry, with a price of $0.004 and a capitalization of $4 billion, according to Investopedia. According to Dune, the total number of ICO participants was nearly 24,000, of whom only 10,145 were able to purchase the token. The average investment amount was $44,209. According to Bubblemaps, more than 75% of PUMP's total supply is concentrated in 843 addresses that bought allocations over $100,000. Of these, 179 wallets hold $1 million or more worth of tokens. Currently, premarket trading for PUMP is available on Hyperliquid, where the token has consistently traded above the presale price. At its peak, the rate reached $0.0072, according to Hyperliquid data. The public launch of the auction is scheduled for July 15. Opinions on the success of the token sale have remained mixed. ”PUMP will receive 25% of the trading proceeds, so in addition to being one of the largest ICOs in history, the token will also be one of the most profitable in terms of gross proceeds in the crypto industry,” announced Hasib Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly Venture Fund. Pump.fun's founder, known as Alon, described the sale of 15% at $600 million, while the sell page lists 12.5% or $500 million. A trader under the pseudonym Ashcryptoreal commented on the speed of the fundraising:”Pumpfun has closed an investment round. $600 million in 12 minutes. People haven't learned anything.” On-chain analyst rezxbt called PUMP tokenomics a threat to liquidity, noting that 40% of the total token supply is concentrated in the hands of the project team.
