Popular Solana token launchpad Pump.fun had its X (formerly Twitter) account compromised early Wednesday and used to promote a handful of fake tokens, including a purported official token for the platform.
The first post falsely promoted the “official governance” token of Pump.fun, using an image from the platform’s recent mobile app launch video alongside a Solana contract address for a fraudulent PUMP token.
Despite early calls that the account was compromised and the token was heavily bundled—meaning that the supply was concentrated between clusters of connected wallets—the token breached a $5 million market cap before its swift decline.
“Pump.fun account has been compromised, please don’t interact,” the platform’s co-founder Alon Cohen posted on X.
As of this writing, Cohen confirmed to Decrypt that the Pump.fun team has not regained access to the account, but that the team is working with others to help reestablish control. In the meantime, the hacker continues to push apparent scam tokens to the account’s followers.
Cohen further indicated that all security best practices were followed for the account and he suspected the issue came from “within X.”
Pseudonymous on-chain investigator ZachXBT backed that assertion in his Telegram channel, where he directly connected the Pump.fun account takeover with similar hacks of X accounts belonging to Jupiter DAO and the Dogwifhat (WIF) token.
“Notably, for these attacks, it is likely not the fault of either the Pump.fun or Jupiter DAO teams,” ZachXBT wrote. “I suspect a threat actor is social engineering employees at X with fraudulent documents/emails or a panel is being exploited.”
Rumors of a real Pump.fun token swirled in recent weeks, but they were quickly denied by Cohen.
New meme coin launches on Pump.fun have cooled since the LIBRA token scandal earlier this month, with broader meme coin trading demand also falling lately amid a market downturn. Even so, more than 8 million tokens have been deployed on the platform since its debut early last year.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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