I took a look at the buyback records on the pump.fun website. It’s a little heartbreaking.
From November 5 to 14, they bought and burned PUMP every single day for ten days. The most they spent in one day was $813,000, and the least was still $438,000. That comes to about $5.69 million in total—roughly half their revenue spent propping up the price.
So what happened? PUMP opened at 0.004249 on Binance on 11/5, and now it’s at 0.002949—down a little over 30% in ten days. Yesterday, it plunged to an intraday low of 0.002726.
There was another piece of news yesterday: three wallets transferred 1.458 billion newly unlocked PUMP tokens to Coinbase Prime, worth about $5.01 million at the time. Transferring them there doesn’t necessarily mean they were sold, but that amount is almost equal to the total buybacks over ten days. Let that sink in.
My take: Buybacks can support sentiment, but they can't withstand linear unlocks combined with a broad market decline. The next one is on December 11, when 6.875 billion tokens will go to the team and early investors. DefiLlama estimates that's about 1.5% of the circulating supply.
In this tug-of-war between buybacks and unlocks, who do you think will win?