Memecoin Launchpad Pump.Fun Loses Nearly $2M in Dramatic Exploit

Hold onto your memecoins, folks! The wild and wacky world of Pump.Fun just hit a major bump. This Solana-based memecoin platform, a hot spot for token launches lately, found itself in the midst of chaos today.

Picture this: jagged lines, arrows flying everywhere, and memecoins spilling out of the metaphorical bag. That’s right—Pump.Fun was exploited in a heist worthy of a brick in the teeth. The villain of the day used flashloans to swipe at least 12,300 SOL, valued at a cool $2 million.

But wait, there’s more! Just when things seemed darkest, the Pump.Fun team swooped in like superheroes!? They upgraded their contracts in the nick of time, stopping the attacker from wreaking any more havoc. The team reassured everyone that user-wallets connected to the dApp are safe, and any tokens that were supposed to be burned remain secure.

Pump.Fun, for the uninitiated, is a haven for non-technical users who want to launch memecoins without breaking a sweat or the bank. It’s been a launching pad for hundreds of tokens on Blast and Solana, raking in over $10 million in revenue last month alone, according to DeFiLlama.

The Great Key Caper

Here’s where it gets even juicier. During the attack, Pump.Fun’s service account was playing double agent, cosigning all the exploiter’s transactions. Analysts are pointing fingers at a private key compromise, which allowed this nefarious flashloan exploit to go down.

Flashloans, for those not in the know, are like instant loans that need to be borrowed and repaid within a single blockchain block. They’re typically used for arbitrage, collateral swaps, or liquidations. Our crafty villain used MarginFi’s flashloan services for this caper.

When a token hits its bonding curve on Pump.Fun, the service account is supposed to burn the bonding curve liquidity to Raydium, kicking off open market trading. But thanks to the alleged compromised key, the hacker diverted the liquidity, repaid the flashloan, and even sprinkled some leftover funds to various Solana token holders.

Let’s launch some Zaba memetokens on pump.fun together and have fun doing so. See you in Discord to have a chat about it.