Community Trust ScoreVerified
Former Pump.fun workers say they got pushed out roughly two months before their PUMP token grants were due to vest — and then watched the company’s own team unlock 50 billion tokens worth around $102 million.
The story broke through an X account claiming to speak for more than 40 ex-employees. The account started posting termination emails, and the timing looked bad for Pump.fun. Contracts were cut in early April, per the posts. Workers were supposed to receive a quarter of their PUMP allocation about two months after that. Those grant agreements had originally been signed in mid-June 2025. Pump.fun hasn’t said a word publicly about any of it. Co-founder Noah Tweedale did offer one explanation for the layoffs — he said the company had grown too fast to keep running at the pace it had set for itself. Departing staff got severance of one week’s pay for every month they’d worked. One former employee, per reports, missed out on a PUMP token stake worth seven figures at current market prices. That’s a big number to leave on the table.
Not a small burn, either.
The $370 Million Burn and the July Unlock
The same month those workers were let go, Pump.fun ran a $370 million token burn, wiping out roughly 36% of the circulating PUMP supply. Co-founder Alon Cohen backed the move as a deliberate financial strategy. Then on July 12, the insider cliff expired. That released 82.5 billion tokens in total — 50 billion went to the team, 32.5 billion to existing investors. The team’s slice alone was valued at around $102 million at the time. So the company burned a massive chunk of supply, cut a big portion of its workforce, and then unlocked nine figures’ worth of tokens for insiders. The sequencing is what’s drawing attention.
Revenue numbers during the same stretch were actually pretty strong. In the 30 days leading up to July 22, Pump.fun pulled in $19.1 million from trade fees and other platform charges. Daily revenue hit $764,802 on July 22, which was a 22.6% jump from the prior month. For a platform that just shed a large chunk of its staff, the revenue line wasn’t suffering. That gap between the company’s income and what former employees say they lost out on is probably the sharpest part of the grievance.
PUMP itself traded near $0.0020 last Friday — up 6% in a single day. But that’s still well below where it peaked back in September 2025, and it’s below the initial coin offering price too. So holders aren’t exactly celebrating.
Filings Missing, Lawsuit Pending
Verifying the full scope of the layoffs is hard right now. The entity behind Pump.fun is a UK-registered company called Baton Corporation Ltd. It hasn’t filed its accounts for the period ending September 2025 — those were due by June 30. The last available filings cover the year up to March 2024. That’s a pretty wide gap. Without the updated accounts, the official employee headcount and the company’s current financial position can’t be confirmed from public records. It’s basically impossible to know how many people actually worked there, or how many were let go.
And there’s more legal pressure on top of all this. Noah Tweedale and Alon Cohen are both named in a securities class action filed in New York back in January 2025. Pump.fun hasn’t responded to requests for comment on that case either. The company’s silence is pretty consistent at this point — no public statement on the layoffs, no response to the class action press, nothing on the token vesting dispute.
The X account speaking for the ex-employees is still active. Claims are unresolved.
A second wave of layoffs has been reported but verification is sparse. No one’s confirmed it officially, and Pump.fun certainly hasn’t. Until Baton Corporation Ltd files those overdue accounts, the actual employee numbers stay murky. That pending filing would probably clear up a lot — how many people were on staff, what the payroll looked like, whether the headcount drop matches what former workers are describing. Right now it’s all coming from one side of the dispute.
The contrast is hard to ignore. The platform’s revenue grew month over month. The team unlocked $102 million in tokens. And more than 40 former employees say they were cut loose just before their own grants would have paid out. Whether the timing was deliberate or just bad luck for those workers, it’s not a great look for a platform that runs on community trust. Solana launchpads live and die by developer and trader sentiment, and Pump.fun’s silence isn’t making that easier to manage.
Baton Corporation Ltd’s overdue accounts were expected by June 30.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Pump.fun lay off employees?
Co-founder Noah Tweedale said the company grew too quickly to sustain its fast-paced operations, leading to the contract terminations in early April.
How much were the unlocked team tokens worth?
When the insider cliff expired on July 12, the 50 billion tokens allocated to the Pump.fun team were valued at approximately $102 million.
