After a 65-day radio silence, Pump.fun co-founder Alon Cohen returned to X with a rare admission of failure regarding the platform’s economic engine. Cohen stated that the previous Dynamic Fees V1 model had "skewed incentives toward low-risk coin creation instead of high-risk trading," effectively subsidizing low-effort token churn at the expense of liquidity providers. The market responded immediately to the proposed overhaul, sending the platform’s native $PUMP token up 10% to $0.0026.
The Pivot: Creator Fee Sharing
The core of the update is a new ‘Creator Fee Sharing’ module designed to professionalize token launches. Instead of a rigid fee structure that rewarded volume spamming, the new system allows deployers to split revenue across up to 10 distinct wallets. This granular control extends to governance, enabling teams to transfer coin ownership or revoke update authority entirely post-launch.
Creator fees may have skewed incentives toward low-risk coin creation instead of high-risk trading. Traders are the lifeblood of the platform.
This technical shift addresses a specific pain point in the Solana ecosystem: the reliance on informal, trust-based agreements for revenue sharing among dev teams. By engaging the protocol level, Pump.fun attempts to lower the friction for legitimate projects while raising the bar for low-effort "rug" developers who previously exploited the fee model for quick exits.
Traders Over Turists
Cohen’s pivot signals a fundamental strategy shift for the platform entering 2026. The acknowledgment that traders, not just creators, are the "lifeblood" suggests future updates will aggressively favor retention and liquidity depth over pure launch metrics. The platform’s revenue model had increasingly relied on the 99% of tokens that fail to graduate; this update attempts to align incentives with the 1% that sustain volume.
$PUMP held its gains at $0.0026 following the announcement, though it remains significantly below its September 2025 highs. The immediate 10% candle indicates market makers expect this pivot to stem the exodus of liquidity to rival launchpads that have recently encroached on Pump.fun’s dominance.
