Pump.fun Wires $6.85M in SOL to Kraken After 15-Day Silence

Pump.fun's fee wallets woke up. The launchpad pushed 76,111 SOL, roughly $6.85 million, to a wallet tagged as a Kraken deposit address, Lookonchain flagged in a Nov. 6 update backed by an Arkham transaction view. The transfers ran through an intermediary wallet and came after 15 days of nothing moving, according to market commentary account The Money Ape.

The deposits landed in chunks — about 7,227 SOL, 7,170 SOL and 20,464 SOL among them. A separate view shared by The Money Ape tracked tokens moving out of the deposit address and into a wallet labeled as Kraken's hot wallet. Lookonchain called it renewed selling, though its update didn't pin down an execution price, and an exchange deposit only proves the tokens arrived — not when or at what level they were traded.

The stack keeps climbing. Lookonchain puts Pump.fun's cumulative sales at 5,553,833 SOL, up 317,210 SOL and $34.4 million from its September snapshot. Back on Sept. 27, the platform moved 47,994 SOL worth $5.83 million to Kraken, when the running tally sat at 5,236,623 SOL valued at $848 million.

Meanwhile, traders are taking swings at the business model. A trader posting as j argued Pump.fun profits from endless token creation and repeated trading without improving outcomes for users, calling the team neither user-aligned nor ecosystem-aligned. The critique zeroed in on fees banked before tokens migrate off the launchpad, even when individual coins never build a lasting market. Even so, j credited the platform with helping them become a multimillionaire at 20 and said they hope the team turns things around.

The wishlist is long: higher starting market caps, liquidity that compounds over time, no callout rewards, fewer trading modes that pit users against each other, and a one-launch-per-24-hours cap on creators. An airdrop should come after the product work, j wrote, with rewards pointed at users rather than influencers. Another commentator, Kioto, said Robinhood currently has the best shot at pulling trading volume back into memecoins — a thread that nodded to Vlad Tenev and a chain pitched for real-world assets and memecoins. The Hyperliquid comparison did the rest: a late arrival can win by learning from the incumbents' mistakes.

Pump.fun has been spending on its own token too. Between Aug. 3 and Aug. 9 it pulled in $10.03 million in fees and spent about $5.02 million buying and burning 2.15 billion PUMP, under a framework that commits 50% of designated revenue to buybacks and burns through a locked smart contract. The SOL transfers also coincided with reporting that Chinese authorities halted Solana's planned Shanghai event and would investigate domestic entities and individuals promoting it, per China's Financial Times, which cited a People's Bank of China official pointing to advertising on Citigroup Tower in Lujiazui. Solana Foundation President Lily Liu had blamed the October postponement on registrations quadrupling overnight and blowing past the venue's capacity. The Money Ape floated whether Pump.fun knew about the probe in advance, offering no evidence.