Pump.fun locks creator fees after “vamping” drains trust on Solana, industry reaction snowballs

Pump.fun now lets creators change fee wallets only once after launch, moving to curb “vamping” on Solana as platform revenue falls and industry figures call for coordinated reform.

Pump.fun, the dominant Solana (SOL)-based memecoin launchpad, announced a significant protocol change on March 24 that caps creator fee modifications to a single post-launch edit — a direct response to rampant fee manipulation that has eroded user trust across the platform. The update was announced by co-founder Alon Cohen, known on X as @a1lon9, in a thread that has since accumulated over 396,200 views, 2,600 likes, and 479 retweets.

Pump.fun reacts to curb ‘vamping’

The problem, as Cohen explained it, had been structural. Every token deployed on pump.fun carries an assigned Coin Admin who controls the creator fee setup — who receives the fees, how they are distributed, and in what proportions. Until now, those Coin Admins faced no limits on how many times they could alter those settings. “Coin Admins had free reign to change fee recipients and distribution as much as they desire, which ultimately led to manipulation,” Cohen wrote. The pattern was predictable: a creator would deploy a token with fees directed toward a third-party wallet to build community trust, allow the token to gain traction and generate meaningful fee revenue, then quietly redirect those fees back to themselves. “People realize, get frustrated, the coin loses traction and narrative is ruined,” Cohen added.

The fix is relatively simple in mechanism but significant in impact. Under the new rules, every token launches with standard creator fees by default, and the creator is granted exactly one opportunity to redirect those fees to a different wallet. After that single reassignment, the configuration becomes permanent and cannot be altered. “The result: if the creator redirects fees to another wallet, those settings are locked. If they don’t redirect fees, their one chance to do so can be used later,” Cohen said. All existing coins with active fee distributions have had their settings locked retroactively under the update.

The announcement triggered a wave of responses from across the Solana ecosystem, with one post in particular hitting 215,300 views within hours. Tom, a well-known Solana trader who goes by @SolportTom on X, directly called out major trading platforms to join the effort. “We can all agree that vamps suck ass. Need to work together to solve it,” he wrote, tagging @a1lon9, @AxiomExchange, @TradingTerminal, and others. His argument cut against short-term financial incentive: “Yes there’ll be less money in fees but a better space = this will last longer.”

The response illustrated a broader sentiment that has been building on pump.fun for months. The platform, which allows virtually anyone to create and trade memecoins on Solana in seconds, has faced recurring criticism over how its fee structure rewards deployers at the expense of traders. In January, pump.fun overhauled its creator-fee model after acknowledging that its Dynamic Fees V1 system had inadvertently incentivized coin creation over actual trading activity — the lifeblood of the platform.

The update arrives at a difficult moment for the platform commercially. Despite pump.fun expanding beyond memecoins in March with support for assets including WBTC, USDC, and Ethereum via Wormhole — and surpassing 1.5 million app downloads — its fee revenue and monthly trading volume remain well below 2025 levels. At its January 2025 peak, the platform generated $15.38 million in a single day in protocol fees; that figure has fallen sharply since. Cohen himself acknowledged the limits of the current fix. “It’s important to note that this is one small step towards overcoming a much larger problem,” he wrote, thanking “hundreds of traders who have given myself or pump.fun affiliates meaningful feedback over recent months.”

Solana (SOL) is currently trading at $92.17, up 3.29% over the past 24 hours, according to crypto.news data.