Pump.fun’s promotion with Kimchi drew scrutiny after token spikes and sharp reversals
PANews, citing BlockBeats, reported that pump.fun’s rollout of the KIMCHI token on Oct. 20 was quickly followed by official promotional posts and a repost from co-founder Alon, helping push the token’s market capitalization to roughly $35 million to $40 million within an hour. The report said a wallet labeled "Kimchi" by pump.fun received creator fees permanently tied to the token and held 75.32% of supply. A second episode on Oct. 22 centered on a "project kimchi" poster carrying pump.fun branding, app store badges, and a QR code. After Alon reposted it, the related token’s market cap briefly climbed to about $10 million to $15 million before the posts were deleted and the token fell below $300,000, according to the article. BlockBeats also said the earlier KIMCHI token dropped 49% after the incident and was down about 70% from its peak. The article further cited on-chain analysis claiming that three addresses that bought before the first ad post made about $100,000 in roughly nine minutes, while the address labeled Kimchi also received 1.35 billion PUMP from Binance and OKX hot wallets over three hours, worth about $6.25 million to $6.43 million. PANews noted that the piece reflected the author’s views and did not represent investment advice.
