Pump.fun is sued again: Lawyers accuse it of being a "manipulated casino," Solana ecosystem falls into a public opinion whirlpool

【Chain Wen】Burwick Law LLP recently filed a new round of lawsuit against Pump.fun and the underlying Solana ecosystem, accusing the platform of actually operating an “unlicensed gambling” activity.

According to the lawsuit documents, although Pump.fun claims to be a chance game, its true operational logic has been exposed—platform leaders “privately preset winners and losers,” extracting huge profits from ordinary investors. The plaintiffs even presented some heavy evidence: comments obtained from private messages of Pump.fun co-founder Alon Cohen show that he admits most investors will “suffer losses” on the platform, and explicitly states that the platform “significantly lowered the threshold for low-market-cap token trading, but pushed all participants into extremely low-win-rate gambling related to such assets.”

In addition, the lawsuit also accuses certain KOLs of secretly being paid to promote Meme coins without disclosing related arrangements, and of gaining early knowledge of token information before the activity launch to build positions. This “insider trading” style operation has raised serious questions about fairness.

However, the matter is not that simple. Although the lawsuit documents are grand in scale, they still have some weaknesses in terms of “ironclad evidence”—they neither present direct proof that Pump.fun coordinated a “pump and dump” scheme nor demonstrate that executives directly profited from it. The core accusation of the lawsuit actually focuses on the “lack of fair protection mechanisms” on the platform, such as not setting up random entry windows to weaken the advantages of bots and insiders.

As for the accusations involving Solana, the reason given is that the network’s high speed, priority fee mechanism, and a network update in March 2024 enabled large-scale Meme coin trading. But this logic is generally considered to be somewhat “overextended” within the community.