Original Author: TechFlow
The biggest event in the past two days is undoubtedly the token presale of the meme launch platform Pump.fun.
After much anticipation, PUMP launched its presale on July 12th, selling out a total of $500 million worth of shares in just 12 minutes. This can't help but make people marvel that it's not a lack of money in the market, but rather that market funds are more inclined to wait and invest in major projects.
With Bitcoin breaking through to a new high, the PUMP presale seems to be at a subtle turning point where market sentiment shifts from bearish to bullish, with more people experiencing FOMO, and whales continuously opening long positions on Hyperliquid.
In contrast, another group of people missed out on obtaining PUMP through CEX.
Pump.fun's official website data shows that several CEXs that previously announced presale cooperation have a 0% share in the successful PUMP presales; while other CEXs with data like Kraken, Kucoin, and Gate account for only around 10% of the total PUMP presale.
If you also tried to participate in the PUMP presale through CEX, you probably came up empty-handed.
But don't be disappointed just yet, here are more data points that might help balance your perspective, pointing to a clearer conclusion --- the PUMP presale might be a celebration for a few.
Kraken, a Celebration for Two
In the pre-arranged plan, Pump.fun's presale collaborated with 6 CEXs; regardless of the specific process and reasons, from the results, three of them showed zero presale data, which shifted focus to the other three CEXs.
Kraken was the CEX with the most allocated shares, generating a total of $30 million in new token allocation.
You might think many users obtained PUMP through Kraken, but the actual situation might be --- only 2 people got the allocation.
According to Twitter user @splinter0n's monitoring of presale interface data, Kraken's "number of participants" was 2, meaning only 2 people participated in the new token allocation (2 independent addresses), and they collectively obtained $30 million in allocation.
In the comments of the post, everyone discussed who these two people might be, but overall social media tends to believe these are strategic moves by powerful whales, and ordinary investors can't obtain such large amounts, especially when CEXs are collectively having issues.
Additionally, the blogger showed more data, indicating that only 15 people participated through Gate, totaling $5 million in allocation; Kucoin had 120 participants, totaling nearly $16.5 million in allocation.
This means that the three exchanges that could obtain PUMP shares had fewer than 140 participants in total; considering that one person might have multiple addresses, this number is likely even smaller.
It's worth noting that regarding the authenticity and credibility of the data, the total number of presale participants and total amount in the blogger's monitored data are almost consistent with the official Pump.fun data.
So for the number of people obtaining PUMP through these CEXs, although the official source hasn't clarified, we have reason to believe this is close to the actual situation.
In any case, obtaining PUMP through CEX is for the minority, leaving most in disappointment.
Most People Only Bought $500 Worth
If CEX users failed to participate due to process issues, did retail investors who went directly to the official website make a fortune?
Let's look at the data.
The overseas media and data analysis platform Blockworks recently launched a data panel that can clearly show various data from this PUMP presale.
First, a total of 10,000 unique addresses participated in the purchase, with the most concentrated purchase amount between $100-1000, and the median purchase at around $540.
Note this is the median, not the average, which statistically excludes the situation where a few super whales would pull up the average.
This means most addresses only participated with $500; on Twitter's timeline, you might find numerous posts complaining about not being able to buy or experiencing FOMO, seemingly as if they missed out on hundreds of thousands of dollars.
There's often a huge gap between real data and social media sentiment. Emotions can be amplified, but wallet funds remain the same.
Looking at large investors, 202 wallets purchased over $1 million, and 138 wallets purchased over $500,000.
Additionally, some interesting data is worth noting.
Among all presale wallets, new wallet addresses created within 24 hours accounted for nearly 45%.
If there's a purchase limit per wallet, large investors and institutions can maximize their purchases by batch creating new wallets.
In contrast, wallets existing for over a year and participating in the presale account for less than 5%. This supports a community discussion point --- the presale favors large investors, and old investors might become "exit liquidity".
Finally, examining the funding sources for direct Pump official website participants, you'll find that besides self-created independent addresses, most offline funds actually came from Binance withdrawals, even exceeding the total number of withdrawal addresses from all other CEXs combined.
On-chain, DeFi projects in the Solana ecosystem like Raydium, SolFi, and Jupiter contributed significant funding sources. Looking at them together, addresses with funds from independent addresses and DEXs already exceed 60% among the 10,000+ participating addresses, with CEX accounting for less than 30%.
This again emphasizes the importance of channels.
For most crypto projects, the shorter the participation path, the better; people tend to prefer convenience, and if they have to withdraw from CEX to their own address to participate in the presale, their willingness to participate will naturally decrease.
So now we see why each CEX is directly embedding on-chain token sales and creating their own on-chain wallets in their APP interfaces.
Marginal Players
Looking at these PUMP presale data together, the seemingly open decentralized presale shows an increasingly centralized tendency at the data level.
Low-cost new wallet creation, pre-market long and short trading on Hyperliquid, CEX participation channels failing... All these make the PUMP presale look more like an elite game and arrangement, rather than a community-driven opportunity.
This is also not the first time we've seen FOMO and criticism emotions amplified on social media. Investors always chase the phantom of the "next 100x coin" but often find themselves marginal participants when facing the data.
And as we continue to observe in this "disappointment", the market will increasingly rely on fund flows from a few.
Standing at this point of Bitcoin's new high, marginal players still feel the chill of being at the top.
