Pump.Fun’s Bounties Platform Is a Black Hole of Circular Grifting

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Would you run into a crowded university lecture hall, fart into a megaphone, and bellow “fartcoin” at the top of your lungs? If so—and should you have the means to document this stunt on video, preferably capturing the audience’s reaction—you may claim a reward of approximately $1,000.

The money, of course, will be dispensed in fartcoin, a meme cryptocurrency trading at a little over 10 cents at time of publication, with a total market capitalization hovering around $130 million.

Such is the promise of Pump.Fun GO, a new feature on Pump.Fun, one of the fastest-growing crypto businesses of the past few years. It supposedly allows users to “pay anyone to do anything.” Crypto bounties are put up by individuals—or pooled from multiple wallets—and held in escrow by Pump.Fun until a countdown clock runs out. Finishing a task is supposed to net you the prize payout; creators get a refund if nobody completes the mission.

Pump.Fun, whose legal department did not return a request for comment, has said without clarifying its process that it moderates and approves the submissions of bounties as well as relevant collection claims. An initial wave of GO bounties included enticements to parachute into a World Cup game in a memecoin-themed costume and a prompt for a Black person to cover themselves in watermelon and repeat the phrase “I’m your friend, the watermelon man.”

Terms of service state that GO users are responsible for their own “actions, decisions, wallet security, submissions, communications, and compliance with law.” They also warn that the platform may remove content, suspend accounts, and cooperate with third-party authorities in cases of “fraud, scams, market manipulation, infringement, hacking, scraping, abusive or illegal content, stolen property, unlawful financial activity, or other harmful or prohibited conduct.” Crypto transfers and rewards are “not guaranteed,” according to these terms.

The GO feature, arriving just as the platform is contending with a massive crash in user engagement, seems to promise further accusations of lawlessness and deceptive practices for Pump.Fun, already a lightning rod for controversy. Many of the bounties, such as one requesting footage of a memcoin-themed car exploding in a ball of flame, are flooded with AI-generated imagery presented as evidence of a completed task. People who actually carry out a challenge have no apparent recourse if someone else’s submission is selected as a winner by Pump.Fun according to some unspecified backroom criteria.

Fine print can also complicate the picture: a $215 bounty titled “Go to McDonalds and get a burger” specifies that the payout will be split between the first 20 valid entries, coming out to $10.75 in crypto each—less than what most paid for their meal.

While that bounty is rather mundane, others still open at the moment are strikingly dystopian, exploitative, or harmful. There are multiple requests for users to get the names of various cryptocurrencies tattooed on their body, and a man in India has already had his forehead tattooed for the equivalent of $3,000. (Video replies depicting people completing more degrading tasks frequently come from users in countries outside the US.) You can record yourself begging a gas station attendant for a pill to help with your flaccid penis for about $100, interview multiple homeless people and ask who they voted for ($700), or quit your job on camera ($3,000). “Bonus points for style, creativity, and chaos,” the last prompt reads. “This is your severance package.”

Andrew Ford Lyons, a technologist who works on digital security and safety projects for human rights groups and other organizations, tells WIRED that GO is incentivizing coercion, harassment, and significant physical and legal risks, “leveraging inequality” for online entertainment. “This is essentially what the digital economy is boiling down to,” he says.

“People posting bounties may have very little understanding of the laws they could be subject to depending on who accepts the challenge, where that person is located, how old they are, whether the task involves harassment or trespass, and what happens as a result,” Lyons says, while those accepting the challenges “are essentially entering into risky arrangements with random strangers on the internet,” potentially exposing themselves to everything from mere embarrassment to material danger and arrest. “The exploitative element is obvious: Someone with money can outsource degradation to someone with less money, fewer protections, or who's just more desperate.”

Lyons notes that GO is not particularly original, either, following the model of stunt-based platforms like Dare Market and Cajole as it chases continued relevance. “Crypto has already shown itself, in the main, to be very good for some of the worst use cases: scams, money laundering, speculative manipulation, and buying drugs online,” he adds. While, in the case of GO, there's “no serious guarantee that [people] will be protected or compensated if or when something goes wrong.”

According to the GO homepage, more than $300,000 has been paid out to users in the past two weeks, with a roughly equal amount yet unclaimed. It’s not clear how much the platform, which normally charges a 0.95 percent fee on crypto trades, may be collecting on these transactions.

When it debuted in 2024, Pump.Fun helped supercharge the memecoin boom by making it possible for anyone to create their own token on the public Solana blockchain in minutes, with little technical expertise and almost no upfront cost. Most of the coins derive their value largely from online hype rather than any underlying utility. Since then, users have launched millions of these gimmicky cryptocurrencies, few of which ever break through into the mainstream crypto economy.

As its name implies, the organizing principles of Pump.Fun are reckless speculation and unchecked self-promotion, which has led to rather predictable problems. A livestream feature was shut down between November 2024 and April 2025 because users were going to extremes to boost their coins, with one even setting himself on fire. Pump.Fun’s parent company and founders, along with Solana executives, are also facing a class-action suit alleging securities fraud and racketeering.

Now there are people looking to fleece or humiliate one another via paid dares on a platform infamous for alleged pump-and-dumps and rug pull schemes. And there’s little reason to believe anyone will strike it rich. Since it burst onto the scene Pump.Fun has been a cutthroat ecosystem where few strike it rich, with signs now pointing to a collapse of the memecoin boom it fueled.

Who actually stands to make money off crypto bounties? Probably just the guys at the top.