Pump.fun buys Kolscan in first acquisition, eyes gamified trading

Crypto memecoin creation platform Pump.fun has made its first-ever acquisition, buying the wallet-tracking platform Kolscan, with its founder looking at gamification to drive growth. 

Pump.fun said on Thursday that it had acquired Kolscan, a platform named after the term “key opinion leader” that “monitors the activities of top onchain traders,” gives real-time transactions, their gains and a “leaderboard ranking their performance.”

“Our integration will not only enable better products for both Kolscan and pump fun users, but allow for totally new experiences that will change the entire onchain trading landscape,” Pump.fun said.

The acquisition appears to be a bid from Pump.fun to bolster its future offerings ahead of its initial coin offering (ICO) on Saturday, which aims to raise $1 billion. The platform has been losing market share to rival newcomer memecoin launcher LetsBonk. 

Gamifying trading “key to growing” 

Pump.fun co-founder Alon Cohen wrote on X that the Kolscan acquisition aligned with his belief that “onchain trading is a social sport,” with memecoin punters trading with friends and comparing their bets.

“We believe that products that provide social insights/tools and gamify the trading experience are key to growing our ecosystem.”

Pump.fun was credited with last year’s memecoin revival. Memecoins are crypto tokens that are usually tied to social media trends that have no intrinsic value or utility beyond highly speculative trading.

The platform allows users with no coding skills to easily create tokens, which saw Pump.fun make millions of dollars in revenue a day at its peak in January, according to DefiLlama.

Pump.fun plans more Kolscan features

Cohen added that Pump.fun plans to improve and tack on additional features to Kolscan and has made the tool free to use.

He added Pump.fun plans to improve the reliability and speed of the data for tokens, trades and profit and losses, along with making the leaderboard “reward real traders again, not just ‘KOLs.’”

Pump.fun also plans to “give additional insights into copytrading activity [and] other datapoints that can shed light on a trader’s strategies.”

Cohen said the platform will be “a core part of our push to building crypto’s social media platform that can scale to the billions.”

Pump.fun has already started to offer social media-type features such as livestreaming, which it shut down last year after users broadcast harmful and violent acts. 

The feature was revived in April for a handful of users with moderation systems in place.

Pump.fun ICO aims to raise $1 billion

Meanwhile, Pump.fun said on Wednesday that it was launching an ICO for its “PUMP” token on Saturday after weeks of speculation and leaks.

PUMP will have a total supply of 1 trillion tokens, 330 billion of which, or 33%, will be set aside for investors at $0.004 a pop to target a $1 billion raise.

Institutional investors will be allocated 180 billion tokens from the ICO, with the public sale to comprise 150 billion PUMP, confirming an earlier leak from crypto exchange Gate.io.

Pump.fun banned its ICO offer to investors in the US and UK due to regulatory concerns.