Why is Pump.fun Willing to Spend Big to Compete for Trading Traffic Amid Fomo's Diversion?

Despite having the infrastructure for meme coins, it still struggles to bridge the "trust" gap.

Written by: David Christopher
Compiled by: Saoirse, Foresight News

The meme coin battlefield is heating up, with Pump.fun and Fomo vying for industry dominance.

In recent weeks, the crypto industry has witnessed a battle of giants: Pump vs. Fomo. The arena they are competing in is the most popular product in the crypto market—speculative trading.

Fomo has effectively demonstrated how a high-quality consumer experience can create a compelling trading product. It has socialized, publicized, and made trading traceable: users can follow traders, view their positions, copy trades, or take the opposite position, and observe the entire trading process in real-time.

This product design has driven rapid growth for the platform. With the market's speculative sentiment warming up, Fomo has become the core hub for participating in the meme coin craze on the Robinhood Chain, leading to a surge in weekly transaction fees and the number of traders on the platform.

This Dune chart shows the weekly trading volume on the Fomo platform: it started growing slowly in early 2025, then saw explosive growth after May 2026, with the Robinhood Chain becoming the main driver of trading volume growth, while the platform's total fees also reached a historical high.

However, Solana remains the stronghold for speculative trading in the crypto market, and Pump.fun occupies a central position in this arena, unwilling to share the market pie.

Fomo relies on the underlying infrastructure owned by Pump.fun and has achieved rapid development through a superior front-end interface, effectively acting as an intermediary between Solana's speculative infrastructure and ordinary speculative users. The term "intermediary" here is not derogatory. Fomo has created a product that meets user needs, continuously generating fees, proving that users are willing to pay for this experience.

Ultimately, most of the features built by Fomo could theoretically be replicated by Pump.fun. We are currently witnessing this: Pump.fun is continuously adding numerous new social features to its application, striving to become the "homepage entry" for speculative trading.

This has placed the two platforms in a delicate situation: they are partners at the infrastructure level, but direct competitors in the user-facing front-end market. Fomo holds user traffic, while the infrastructure supporting trade execution largely belongs to Pump.fun.

Now, Pump.fun aims to capture both the infrastructure and user market simultaneously.

To achieve this goal, Pump.fun is making significant efforts. Reports suggest that the platform is offering contracts worth tens of thousands of dollars per month to lure top traders from Fomo, enticing them to shift their trading activities to Pump.fun. This behavior is not illegal and doesn't even qualify as an industry scandal. Essentially, it is a well-funded platform spending money to attract core users who bring their own traffic.

In addition, Pump.fun has introduced a zero-fee policy for its front-end. It can afford this subsidy because the platform has already achieved profitability through its bond curve mechanism and PumpSwap; this front-end subsidy model is something Fomo cannot replicate.

Many market participants criticize Fomo for charging fees, but this viewpoint overlooks the core issue: what exactly are users paying for?

Users are paying for a complete trading experience: finding traders worth following, viewing their holdings, tracking trading profits, receiving market alerts, and completing all operations through an interface that significantly lowers the barrier to cryptocurrency operations.

Transaction fees are Fomo's core source of income, and the entire user experience is its main business. Pump.fun can offer similar features for free because its underlying business has already provided stable revenue.

In my view, there are two key points worth deeper consideration in this matter.

First, this is another typical case: mature crypto infrastructure projects are beginning to vertically integrate upwards, competing for end-user traffic. A similar scenario is unfolding with Uniswap on the Robinhood Chain. After becoming the core trading infrastructure on-chain, Uniswap started promoting its own launchpad, no longer merely serving as a tool for other platforms. Pump.fun has adopted the same strategy on the Solana chain: it has already mastered the underlying infrastructure for speculative trading and now hopes to further control the consumer end aimed at ordinary users.

Second, I believe the key to the eventual outcome between Pump.fun and Fomo lies in trust.

Being at the center of the meme speculation arena, regardless of whether the evaluation is objective, Pump.fun has a mixed reputation in the crypto community. The rumors about the platform spending heavily to poach traders have further damaged its image.

In contrast, Fomo launched later, carries fewer historical negative burdens, and its product design aims to make trading behavior more transparent and traceable, focusing on social trading.

However, the value of social trading entirely depends on the credibility of the signals released by traders. Traders can publicly buy with one wallet and quietly sell with another; they can build positions in advance and then call out trades, ultimately dumping their tokens to profit from followers. While blockchain achieves transparency in on-chain data, it cannot guarantee that the traders themselves are trustworthy.

Ultimately, the choice of where users trade will depend on which platform can maximize the authenticity of the displayed information. Once traders collude, use multiple hidden wallets to conceal trading behavior, and exploit their followers, users will no longer trust the trading signals. When trust collapses, the value of social trading that both platforms are fiercely competing for will also disappear.

It will be interesting to observe what measures both platforms will take to maintain user trust in the future.

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