Ex-Pump.fun Employee Admits Team Ran Bots to Dump Coins Before Market Launch

A former Pump.fun employee went live on an X Spaces podcast and made one of the most damaging admissions in the platform’s history — then ended the stream abruptly after receiving a direct message from a Pump.fun co-founder mid-broadcast.

The employee, known on X as @Shaams, was speaking on Shaams Sunday — a podcast attended by multiple crypto KOLs and community members — when he revealed that Pump.fun operated bots during its early days that sold tokens just before they were about to graduate to the open market.

In the memecoin ecosystem, that graduation moment — when a coin hits the bonding curve threshold and moves to Raydium — is the event retail traders watch for as a signal of momentum and legitimacy.

If bots were selling into that moment, retail buyers were absorbing the exit.

What Shaams Actually Said

The admission was not buried or vague. Shaams stated directly that the Pump.fun team ran scripts designed to extract maximum profit from coins trading on its own platform — and that this activity was used to fund the company’s early operations.

“We (Pump.fun) had bots that sold right before a coin was about to bond. We had no funding back then, so the profits were reinvested anyway.”

The framing — that the practice was justified because the company had no outside funding and profits were reinvested — does little to address the core problem. Retail users trading on Pump.fun during that period had no knowledge that the platform itself was running bots on its own marketplace, timing exits to maximize profit at the moment of peak retail interest.

The Stream That Ended Mid-Confrontation

The disclosure didn’t unfold cleanly. As Shaams was being pressed by other participants on the podcast about the implications of what he was describing — specifically around insider trading and on-chain conduct while employed at Pump.fun — he received a direct message from a Pump.fun co-founder.

Shortly after, the livestream ended.

The sequence — public admission, confrontation from the audience, DM from leadership, abrupt exit — has done significant damage to Pump.fun’s reputation in the days since. Whether the co-founder’s message was a legal warning, a request to stop talking, or something else has not been disclosed. Shaams has not provided further public comment on what was said.

Why This Lands Differently From Typical Memecoin Criticism

Pump.fun has faced consistent criticism since its launch for the dynamics it creates. The platform made it trivially easy and cheap to launch a token — which meant the overwhelming majority of coins created on it were designed to be pumped and dumped, with creators extracting value from retail buyers who arrived late. That criticism has always been directed at the behavior of external users creating tokens on the platform.

What Shaams described is categorically different. This is an allegation — made by a former employee, on record, in a public broadcast — that the platform itself was running automated bots on its own marketplace to front-run the graduation event that retail traders use as a buy signal. The platform was not just hosting the game. According to this account, it was playing in the game against its own users.

The crypto community’s response was immediate and largely unsurprised. Some participants who were present in the Spaces confirmed they had long suspected bot activity of this kind. Others pointed to on-chain data suggesting that at minimum 20% of all active “traders” in the Solana memecoin ecosystem are automated — a figure that, if accurate, means retail participants are consistently trading against non-human actors operating with informational or technical advantages.

Several users went further, claiming they could personally confirm that coin farming of this type continues on the platform to this day — not by Pump.fun’s team specifically, but by sophisticated actors who have reverse-engineered the graduation mechanics and systematically extract value from the moment retail buyers are most likely to enter.

What This Means for Pump.fun’s Expansion Plans

The timing is particularly uncomfortable for Pump.fun. The platform has been openly signaling plans to expand beyond Solana — with subdomain registrations detected across Ethereum, Base, BNB Chain, and Monad suggesting preparation for a multi-chain rollout. The platform recently crossed $1 billion in cumulative revenue and integrated MoonPay for deposits across nine networks.

A public admission from a former employee that the platform ran bots against its own users during its formative period is not the narrative backdrop a company wants when it’s preparing to expand into new ecosystems and attract institutional attention.

Pump.fun has not issued a public statement in response to Shaams’ comments. The co-founder whose DM ended the stream has not commented publicly. The on-chain record of the early bot activity Shaams described has not been independently verified — but the admission itself, made publicly and on record, is now part of the platform’s documented history.

For the millions of retail users who traded on Pump.fun during its early period believing they were participating in a fair market, the question of what they were actually trading against now has a much more uncomfortable answer than it did a week ago.