Memecoins
Pump Solana Meme Coin Factory. The pleasure compromised by the “Bonding Curve” exploit
The Solana Blockchain’s Hot Coin Factory Pump.Fun fell into chaos Thursday at the hands of an exploiter who compromised the technology central to its wacky cryptocurrency issuance.
“We are aware that contracts on the link curve have been compromised and we are investigating the matter,” the months-old project said on Twitter. account announced two hours of chaos. “We have suspended trading – you cannot buy or sell coins at this time.”
Trading has been suspended for the moment, according to Pompe.funbut before the announcement, traders had to speculate on what was happening on the platform.
Details of the attack were still being pieced together at press time.
According to people who contributed to the early stages of the investigation, an exploiter was using a combination of business tactics to overwhelm Pompe.fun and seemingly cornering the market on dozens of meme coins. Oddly, the on-chain evidence suggests that the attacker did not make much profit. The people spoke with CoinDesk on condition of confidentiality since investigations are still preliminary.
Pompe.fun is a months-old project aimed at creating and gaming meme coins on the Solana blockchain. It presents itself as a “fair launch” platform where investors can purchase joke tokens from the very first moments. The coins sometimes hit their investors hard, but most implode before reaching the critical market cap of $69,000, where the tokens are released into the wild.
Thursday’s exploit affected the smart contracts responsible for issuing the meme coins on Pump.Fun curve, people said. The attacker tricked the platform’s bond curve by accepting ghost SOL tokens that they had borrowed and quickly repaid in what is known as a “flash loan.” This led to bond curves filling up with non-existent SOL, making the tokens appear valuable despite no real interest from the buy side.
The attacker caused losses of $300,000 in SOL tokens, according to on-chain researchers. Rather than absconding with the money, they used it to pay off flash loans and airdrop funds to other people, the sources said.