Despite — or perhaps because of — the controversy surrounding the TRON founder, SunPump has already garnered early success, helping boost TRX to a multi-year high in price.
Sun’s memecoin generator is off to a fast start.
(Wikimedia Commons)
Posted August 23, 2024 at 5:05 pm EST.
Unlike popular memecoin generator Pump.Fun, the success of its newest rival, SunPump, is unusually dependent on the influence of its backer, Justin Sun, the controversial founder of TRON.
Sun’s bullish posts on X and perception as a whale-sized bagholder willing to go to extraordinary lengths to increase network activity has given some of the already most risk-taking people in the crypto space — namely memecoin traders and gamblers — the confidence to strike for gold on the TRON network.
SunPump has already gained early success. Since it rolled out in August, over 33,400 tokens have been deployed and almost 13.1 million TRX, worth about $2.1 million, has been collected in fees, helping the underlying TRON blockchain post its highest-generating-revenue day ever on Tuesday.
TRX is the native cryptocurrency for the TRON network. According to blockchain analytics platform DefiLlama, TRON generated $5.4 million in fees on Aug. 20, and in the last 24 hours, total fees collected stood at $3.2 million.
The price of TRX also spiked to a multi-year high of 16 cents, more than doubling its price from one year ago. TRX has since settled to 15.7 cents, giving the token the 12th largest market cap among all cryptos at $13.7 billion.
SunPump’s early momentum helped the protocol eclipse Solana’s Pump.Fun, the leading memecoin factory, in daily revenue on Wednesday, generating about $568,535 compared to Pump.Fun’s $369,718, according to two Dune Analytics dashboards created by South-Korean-based blockchain company Hashed.
Read more: Most Users Keep Losing Money on Pump.Fun, Despite the Protocol’s Record Profits
Sun’s ‘Bullposting’
SunPump’s initial success largely stems from the fact that Sun is behind it. The influential Sun has 3.5 million followers on X and consistently “bullposts” on social media — crypto parlance for when someone posts comments that are wildly optimistic about a specific project.
For example, on X on Thursday, Sun wrote “We’re on a journey TO THE SUN🌞, so don’t get left behind! @sunpumpmeme.” In another tweet, Sun posted “It’s still early. Just do the math. How big of a market can be created with over $60 billion in liquidity?” referring to the amount of USDT on Tron. He further noted that “the total market cap of [memecoins on TRON] is still less than $200 million USD. TO THE SUN🌞.”
Sun’s reputation as a whale — his onchain portfolio currently stands at $1 billion, of which about $578.2 million comes from his holdings of TRX and Tron’s algorithmic stablecoin USDD, according to Arkham Intelligence — dedicated to promoting his ventures —is helping fuel SunPump’s growth, according to 0xKyle, a research analyst at Artemis.
“SunPump is different because most people are apeing on the thesis that ‘Justin Sun will do anything to boost his chain’ and not because they actually like the memes,” 0xkyle told Unchained over Telegram. He added that memecoin traders moving to TRON are “basically going into a casino with the assumption that you will win because the house will do anything to make it attract more users; that’s the assumption you’re making when you go to TRON and play.”
“SunPump is sustainable insofar as people keep believing in Justin Sun,” 0xkyle concluded.
Ironically, Sun’s less-than-stellar reputation may also help SunPump attract the most degen of degen investors, which might give the Tron-based memecoin factory more legs than people think owing to these investor’s willingness to gamble on buying the next billion-dollar memecoin.
Many of Sun’s past projects have been criticized for lacking transparency. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Sun in 2023 for selling unregistered securities and also charged him with market manipulation for wash trading the TRX token. More recently, Sun’s unclear involvement in the running of wrapped bitcoin (WBTC) has led to skepticism about the token.
However, in this case, the risks of deploying funds on one of Sun’s projects could actually be helping SunPump.
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