Pump.fun laid off more than 40 employees across two waves before their PUMP grants could vest. At least one dismissed worker forfeited a token allocation now worth seven figures. Weeks after
Pump.fun, the Solana launchpad that lets anyone mint a meme coin in second, stands accused of firing its own staff to keep their tokens. An anonymous account on X, claiming to speak for more than 40 former employees, spent this week publishing internal termination emails and alleging that two rounds of layoffs were timed to land just before workers qualified for their first PUMP payouts. The allegations, laid out in an investigation by Sandmark, surfaced only weeks after the company’s founders and early backers unlocked billions of their own tokens.
The grant agreements at the center of the dispute were signed in mid-June 2025. Under the terms Sandmark reviewed, the first 25% of an employee’s PUMP allocation would vest after a full year on the job, with the remainder released gradually after that. That first milestone fell in June 2026. Most of the affected staff never reached it.
In late March, head of talent Lloyd McCarthy called employees into a group meeting. Co-founder Noah Tweedale told the room the company had grown too quickly and could no longer move “fast and rough,” the phrase that has since become shorthand for the whole affair. Contracts were terminated in early April, roughly two months before the cliff. Workers received one week of severance for every month they had worked. Their unvested tokens were canceled outright.
The company’s own account points to something more ordinary. Pump.fun hired fast through the 2024 and early 2025 meme coin boom, and when trading volumes cooled it pulled headcount back, paying severance on a fixed formula of one week for each month worked. Read that way, the layoffs were a late correction to overhiring, and the vesting dates were incidental. The detail that reading leaves open is why the unvested tokens were canceled outright instead of being paid out or folded back into the employee pool.
Former staff say a second wave hit in mid-July, pushing the total past 40, though Sandmark could not independently confirm the July headcount, which rests on the ex-employees’ account. By then the company had already trimmed a workforce that earlier in the year had swelled to roughly 100 people.
LayoffsEmployee vestingToken supply eventWhistleblower Employee grant June 2025 Employees sign PUMP grant agreements with a one-year cliff on the first 25%. Layoffs · Wave 1 Early April 2026 Contracts terminated weeks before the June cliff, with unvested tokens canceled. Token burn April 28, 2026 Pump.fun burns roughly $370M in bought-back PUMP, about 36% of circulating supply. Vesting cliff June 2026 The 25% employee vesting cliff passes with the affected staff already gone. Insider unlock July 12, 2026 82.5 billion PUMP unlocks for the team and existing investors, worth around $102M. Layoffs · Wave 2 Mid-July 2026 A second round of cuts, reported by former staff, pushes the total past 40 employees. Whistleblower Late July 2026 An anonymous account begins posting internal termination emails on X.While employees were losing their grants, the people at the top were about to collect. On July 12, exactly one year after PUMP’s initial coin offering, a one-year lockup expired and moved 82.5 billion tokens into insider wallets. Of that, 50 billion went to the core team and 32.5 billion to existing investors, a stake worth around $102 million at late-July prices. Wallet movement alone does not show whether any were sold.
The number is not arbitrary. Pump.fun’s team holds 20% of the one trillion PUMP supply and early investors hold another 13%. Twenty-five percent of that combined 330 billion works out to exactly 82.5 billion. The insiders collected the same one-year, 25% cliff that the fired employees were cut off from, on almost the same clock. Wu Blockchain noted the distribution opened a three-year vesting window for those allocations, so team and investor tokens will keep unlocking into 2029.
Initial Coin Offering33% · 330B PUMPCommunity & Ecosystem24% · 240B PUMPTeam UNLOCKED JUL 1220% · 200B PUMPExisting Investors UNLOCKED JUL 1213% · 130B PUMPLivestreaming3% · 30B PUMPLiquidity & Exchanges2.6% · 26B PUMPTeam and existing investors, shown in amber, hold a combined 33% of the one trillion PUMP supply. The 82.5 billion tokens that unlocked on July 12, 2026 were the first 25% of that stake. Source: Tokenomist.
Token pay is the crypto version of a stock option. Early employees accept below-market salaries in return for a slice of a token that might multiply in value, and vesting cliffs exist to reward the people who stay. The mechanics diverge from equity in one important way. When a startup cancels an employee’s unvested stock, nothing lands in the founders’ pockets. When a token project cancels an unvested grant, the tokens simply stay locked in the treasury, out of circulation, propping up the price that the remaining holders enjoy.
At-will employment does the rest. A company that can dismiss staff without cause can, in practice, decide who reaches a vesting date and who does not. With a volatile token, the timing of a single firing can be worth millions in allocations that never have to be handed over. Ordinary equity vesting rarely creates that pressure, because share dilution is slow and predictable. A liquid token that can be voided weeks before it vests turns every cliff into a decision with a direct financial payoff for whoever signs the termination letter.
April was a busy month at Pump.fun. In the same weeks it was terminating contracts, the company announced on April 28 that it had burned every PUMP token it had bought back over the previous nine months, roughly $370 million worth and about 36% of the circulating supply. It ranked among the largest supply reductions crypto has recorded by share of tokens. The firm also cut its buyback program from 100% of revenue down to 50%, keeping the rest for operations.
None of this came from a company under financial strain. Pump.fun booked $19.1 million in revenue in the 30 days ending July 22, and it crossed $1 billion in lifetime revenue earlier in 2026, the first Solana platform to get there. PUMP barely moved on the layoff reports. PUMP rose about 6% in the 24 hours after the news broke, a sign that crypto markets often read aggressive cost-cutting as a positive for holders.
For US token holders, the employment allegations change nothing about their ownership. The sharper risk is supply. The July unlock started a multi-year release of team and investor tokens, and any large move to exchanges could add selling pressure on a token already trading 75% its 2025 peak.
Source: PUMPUSD on Coinbase | By TradingView The one public record that could settle the headcount is late. Baton’s UK accounts for the period to 30 September 2025, which would disclose employee numbers, were due at Companies House by the end of June and remain unfiled, which leaves the 40-plus figure resting on the whistleblower’s word.
The reputational and legal exposure sits with the entity behind the launchpad. Pump.fun operates as Baton Corporation Ltd. in the UK, where the Financial Conduct Authority warned in December 2024 that the firm may be offering financial services without permission, prompting the platform to block UK users. Allegations that layoffs were timed to strip staff of compensation could pull fresh attention from labor regulators in more than one country.
This is not the company’s first bout of internal turbulence. In May 2024, former developer Jarrett Dunn drained roughly $2 million from the platform using flash loans after a public falling-out with the team. The whistleblower campaign is a quieter kind of revolt, run through leaked emails, It also points to organized pushback from crypto workers over how their pay is handled, something the industry has largely avoided so far. Co-founders Tweedale and Cohen are separately named in a securities class action filed in the Southern District of New York in January 2025.
Whether the pay model shifts may come down to economics. DefiLlama data shows Pump.fun’s revenue annualizing near $327 million in 2026, well below the $971 million it booked in 2025, which leaves the 50% buyback drawing on a shrinking base and points to smaller burns ahead than the one in April. The three-year insider vesting keeps fresh team and investor tokens reaching the market into 2029, and Pump.fun has still not answered the allegations in public. With the anonymous account continuing to post termination emails, the next disclosures look likely to come from former staff rather than from the company.
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