On Thursday, trader Kimchi’s X account sent a brand-new Pump.fun token to a ~$15 million market cap in minutes.
About 30 minutes later the post disappeared and the coin tumbled by over 98%.
Market cap fell to ~$284,000 after $8.66 million in volume
The account shared a photo of a poster on a sidewalk in Manhattan that read “project kimchi, same internet, different outcome.” Poster had a Pump.fun logo, App Store badges and QR code pointing to a fresh token called Project Kimchi.
Market cap hit $10 million in seconds and peaked at about $15 million, though Lookonchain pegged the high at around $14 million.
Pump.fun co-founder Alon Cohen reposted the promo from his personal account, before erasing it. Traders who rescanned the QR code later said it no longer led to the token.
At one snapshot market cap was ~$284k, with $8.66M in trading volume. Another got it at ~$600,000 in minutes and ~$183,000 the next day.
Market cap prices the full supply at last trade.
Lookonchain flagged wallets that bought early and sold into the rally for a combined $385,000+ in profit. It listed three addresses on Solana.
Clayton Kim drops Pump.fun from his X bio as hack claim draws doubt
Early posts blamed an account hack. Skeptical on-chain sleuths doubted this within minutes, citing Cohen’s speedy repost and just as fast reversal.
Cohen did not post any hack warning after pulling the repost, trader Fabiano said on X. If they had a partnership deal, it made little sense for Kimchi to delete Pump.fun posts, he added.
Kimchi, real name 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.
On October 20, two days prior to 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 told Cohen to return buyers’ money. “You literally retweeted a rug pull and made hundreds of people lose money,” the user wrote.
There has been no official finding of fault or refund. Separately, Bitquery also detected three related wallets that made ~$104,000 on an earlier KIMCHI launch around October 20, but couldn’t connect them to the deployer.
Kimchi’s notoriety is based on a claim to ~$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 ~$6 million in verifiable profits.
Bubblemaps said a hidden address was possible, but unlikely, as Kimchi would have probably revealed it by now.
His first KIMCHI meme coin attained ~$40 million within an hour of the Pump.fun signing. An anonymous deployer purchased ~79% of supply for ~$9,300 and routed creator fees to a wallet labeled Kimchi.
Former Pump.fun developer Jarett Dunn got six years in prison from a London judge over a $2 million Solana fraud, Cryptopolitan reported in December 2025.
Only 6.25% of Solana meme traders made a profit over 90 days, with the median trader down $120, Cryptopolitan reported in August.
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