pump.fun's Sapijiju: First-Ever Discussion on Building the Future of Social Trading

**Anil Lulla** (0:00)
You're now plugged in to The Delphi Podcast. Hello, everyone. Nice to have everyone here. This is The Delphi Podcast. I got my partner Yan with me. I'm Anil, CEO of Delphi, and we got a special guest today, Noah, one of the founders of Pump.fun. Now, obviously, I'd say that basically our whole audience knows what Pump.fun is, but maybe Yan, you can kind of set the stage, give everyone maybe some stats or some overview of what Pump.fun is, and then we can pass it on over to Noah.

**Yan Liberman** (0:31)
Yeah, Pump, for those unaware, launched last year and kind of took over the scene. They were doing insane numbers in Q4, and they had one of the most kind of anticipated token launches. They raised a gargantuan amount of money in the beginning of this year, and so the token traded up, then it traded down, and now we're back to about 10% above ICO price. From a market share perspective, they were the dominant launch pad, and then there was a period where Bonk kind of took over, and since then, they've recaptured that market share. Looking at trailing numbers, they've done about $50 million in revenue over the past month, and that's $50 million that's also been delivered straight into the order book to buy back the token, and so that's the trend that seems to continue, and I think that's what's really captured the attention, is in an environment where I don't think anyone would say the trenches are thriving right now, and so despite that, they're still doing, annualized the last month, $600 million in buybacks. And so everyone is kind of really excited to see what they're doing, what their plans are, right? They've raised a lot of money, and they have long term plans, and so the idea is to really understand how they are looking to deploy this cash and grow the platform.

**Sapijiju** (1:56)
Yeah.

**Anil Lulla** (1:56)
Sounds good. Yeah, and I'd say obviously some disclosures, like Yan and I have bump backs, if that's not already clear. We've been really excited to chat with Noah about this, because I think everyone on CT and everything like that knows about Alon and everything like that, but I think Noah has been really helpful to talk to, to get a really good understanding of Pump's role in crypto, both how it can grow within crypto, but also how it can grow crypto itself. So really, Noah, it'd be great to start with your background, how you ended up dedicating your life to Pump, and then we can take it from there.

**Sapijiju** (2:32)
Sounds good. I mean, yeah, I think some people will know me probably from more from the investment-facing side of things. That's kind of been my role, sort of all that sort of thing. So my face and I guess my persona is very much sort of more private. But we thought now is a good time to sort of speak about the products and sort of show different viewpoints, I guess, from internally. Because I think when a lot of people see Pump, they see sort of obviously Arlon on Twitter and then the sort of corporate account, which I think is doing like a really great job sort of discussing what we're planning, all that sort of stuff. But it appeals to different audiences, right? And I think that one of the reasons why I'm speaking on here is to try and speak about what Pump is going to become, not only for the sort of current trench ecosystem we still see now, but what we want to sort of turn this company into. And I think, yeah, again, like a lot of people think like Pump is a small team, there's not many people behind this. But what's actually going on is like, I mean, there's three of us, right? So there's myself, Dylan, and then sort of Arlon, the three co-founders of Pump. And now the team sort of running or working on the Pump platform indirectly is about 70 people now, right? So like we're a really big team, we're still hiring, we're sort of still trying to grow down on that front to be able to become more competitive. So to speak of my background, honestly, I don't have one.
I don't have much of a background, right? Like myself, Arlon, and Dylan, we're all very young, right? Like I founded the company, which is now correlated to Pump in some form at 19, right? And before that, I had basically just been to high school and had did like six months of university, right? And since like 16 or 17, the only thing I'd been working on was crypto. I think, I mean, I know I started off with sort of crypto mining, it might literally my high school room, sort of like increasing the temperature up to sort of like 35 degrees Celsius, because I had like four GPUs running.