The wild 2000s era of internet shock videos is making a return in crypto.
Some issuers of memecoins on Solana’s runaway hit Pump.fun have been streaming videos ranging from extreme dark humor to dark behavior, all to pump their tokens to a few million dollars in market capitalization.
There are streams and images of children tied up, a man locked up in his toilet continuously, killing of hens, fetish videos and softcore porn. Live streaming on the platform was a feature added last week. (Hours after this story was initially published, Pump.fun announced that it was “pausing the live streaming functionality on the site for an indefinite time period until the moderation infrastructure is ready to deal with the heightened levels of activity.”)
Some tokens even have images of a human slashing forearms or playing with fire (though these are quickly taken down). One person was allegedly firing a gun outside their window every time his token zoomed higher. This sort of shock factor can lead to viral content, drawing in more viewers and potential investors.
It isn’t all bad, however. Most of the streams are harmless or contain fun activities such as drawing an egg or talking to an audience. Users have to specifically switch on an “NSFW” tag to land up on questionable content.
Most of the dark tokens don’t have an X page, and their issuers have not publicly shared why they choose to engage in extreme behavior. Memecoins often thrive on internet culture, humor, cuteness, and virality — but such acts may cross a line for what’s considered a harmless act for a meme. Such activities can even draw negative attention from mainstream media.
X users are also reporting some dark streams, such as suicidal streams, death threats, and animal porn among others. (CoinDesk could not independently verify these posts, or if Pump.fun’s moderation team likely took them down.)
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Pump.fun lets anyone issue a token for less than $2 in capital, after which they choose the number of tokens, theme, and meme picture to accompany it. When the market capitalization of any token reaches $69,000, a portion of liquidity is deposited to the Solana-based exchange Raydium and burned.
Pump.fun is among the most-used applications in the industry and the biggest revenue generator across all user apps.
To be clear, Pump.fun has no role in the type of streams users choose to do and has an active moderation team that takes down dark or malicious content. Pump has been moderating platform activity since it started.
“We actively moderate illicit content on the site. That includes images, videos, live streams, and comments,” Pump founder @a1lon9 wrote in an X post over the weekend. “Although we strongly stand for free speech and expression, it’s our responsibility to ensure that users don’t see clearly repulsive/dangerous content and that bad actors aren’t given a platform to act as they wish.”
“If you’re aware of a coin where moderation isn’t enforced, please report it in our support channels immediately,” he added.
Crypto Twitter largely condemns such behavior, however. No influential X account is chiding on issuers of such tokens to continue engaging in their activities, and most of these tokens are failing to break even a $50,000 market capitalization (viral and positive tokens on Pump.fun can easily break $1 million in a few hours).
Meanwhile, sentiment for Pump.fun has largely dived negative amid everything taking place on the platform.
UPDATE (Nov. 24, 2024, 20:10 UTC): Adds that Pump.fun has now paused live streaming on its site.
