A Pump.fun token promoted from trader Kimchi's X account surged to a market capitalization of roughly $15 million within minutes on Thursday, then collapsed by more than 98% after the promotional post disappeared about half an hour later. Pump.fun is a Solana-based launchpad that lets anyone create a tradable token almost instantly, and it has become one of the most popular venues for meme coin launches.

From $15 million to $284,000 in 30 minutes

The post shared a photo of a poster on a Manhattan sidewalk that read "project kimchi, same internet, different outcome." The poster carried a Pump.fun logo, App Store badges, and a QR code pointing to a newly created token called Project Kimchi. The promotion spread quickly across X (@Jeremybtc; @MrketInsider).

The token's market cap hit $10 million within seconds and peaked at about $15 million, though Lookonchain pegged the high at around $14 million. Pump.fun co-founder Alon Cohen reposted the promotion from his personal account before erasing it. Traders who later rescanned the QR code said it no longer led to the token.

One market snapshot put the capitalization at roughly $284,000 against $8.66 million in trading volume; another recorded about600,000 within minutes, falling to approximately $183,000 the next day. Market capitalization prices a token's full supply at the last traded price.

Lookonchain flagged wallets that bought early and sold into the rally for a combined profit of more than $385,000, listing three addresses on Solana.

Hack claim draws doubt

Early posts blamed an account hack. Skeptical on-chain sleuths questioned that account within minutes, citing Cohen's speedy repost and its just-as-fast reversal. Trader Fabiano said on X that Cohen posted no hack warning after pulling the repost, adding that if a partnership deal existed, it made little sense for Kimchi to delete Pump.fun posts (Fabiano on X).

Kimchi, whose real name is Clayton Kim, has since scrubbed Pump.fun from his X bio and wiped older posts about joining the platform. By Friday, neither Kim nor Pump.fun had responded, and whether either breaks its silence remains the episode's most immediate open question.

On October 20, two days before the launch, Kimchi became a creative partner with Pump.fun. Cohen called him "the first ever example of a trader becoming a celebrity."

X user tontheneko urged Cohen to return buyers' money. "You literally retweeted a rug pull and made hundreds of people lose money," the user wrote. The term "rug pull" is industry shorthand for a launch in which insiders or promoters exit abruptly, leaving later buyers holding losses. There has been no official finding of fault or refund.

Separately, Bitquery detected three related wallets that made approximately $104,000 on an earlier KIMCHI launch around October 20, but could not connect them to the deployer.

Profit claims and recent context

Kimchi's notoriety rests on a claim of roughly $40 million in profit from the official TRUMP token, which launched in January 2025. Bubblemaps tracked his linked wallets on the day of the crash and found about $6 million in verifiable profits (Bubblemaps on X). The analytics firm said a hidden address was possible but unlikely, as Kimchi would probably have revealed it by now.

His first KIMCHI meme coin reached a market cap of roughly $40 million within an hour of the Pump.fun signing. An anonymous deployer purchased about 79% of the supply for around $9,300 and routed creator fees to a wallet labeled Kimchi.

Meme coins are tokens built around jokes, personalities, or internet trends rather than earnings or utility, and their valuations tend to rise and fall with social media attention. The episode comes amid other recent turbulence around Pump.fun and Solana meme coins. Former Pump.fun developer Jarett Dunn was sentenced to six years in prison by a London judge over a $2 million Solana fraud, Cryptopolitan reported in December 2025. In August, Cryptopolitan reported that only 6.25% of Solana meme traders made a profit over 90 days, with the median trader down $120 (Cryptopolitan).