Pump.fun launches GitHub creator fee sharing: integrating "tips" into the meme coin factory's funding pipeline

Author: 137Labs

On February 13, 2026, one of the most controversial and high-traffic projects in the Solana ecosystem, Pump.fun, announced the launch of a seemingly “small feature” that could potentially influence its growth logic: users can now allocate “creator fees” to any GitHub account via Pump.fun’s mobile app. The team also previewed that more “social” capabilities will be introduced in the future.

To outsiders, this might look like “adding a tipping feature”; for Pump.fun, it’s more like an upgrade to the fee distribution pipeline: shifting from previously fixed or limited profit-sharing methods to a system where funds can be directed and overflowed to specific targets. It’s not just a UI change—it’s a change in the incentive structure.

1. What is Pump.fun: Lowering the barrier to token issuance to “as easy as posting”

Pump.fun, often abbreviated as Pump, is a platform on Solana for issuing and trading crypto assets: users almost don’t need technical background—just upload an image, fill in a name and ticker, and they can quickly create tokens and trade immediately; once a token reaches certain conditions, it can “graduate” to a decentralized exchange for continued circulation. The platform launched on January 19, 2024, and was founded by Noah Tweedale, Alon Cohen, Dylan Kerler, among others.

This product form has directly led to a fact: most tokens have no functional utility and are mainly categorized as meme coins. With the “issuance as simple as posting,” new coin supply has exploded; media reports as of January 2025 indicate that the total number of meme coins issued on the platform has reached “millions,” making it one of the fastest-growing cases in crypto applications.

But on the other hand, the failure rate of these new coins is very high—most projects fail to sustain trading interest, let alone enter more mature DeFi scenes. This is the fundamental contradiction of Pump.fun: extremely low barriers lead to massive supply, but also generate a lot of noise and high淘汰率.

2. Controversies and costs: When “token issuance + live streaming” becomes a attention race

One of the most discussed periods in Pump.fun’s history is the “attention arms race” that emerged after it introduced live streaming in 2024: project teams, in order to make their tokens stand out among countless new coins, try every possible way to attract traffic and hype. As a result, the platform faced heavy criticism over content moderation and risk issues for a period, and the live streaming feature was temporarily suspended and then re-enabled multiple times.

Meanwhile, regulatory pressure has also become more explicit. For example, the platform was restricted for UK users following warnings from UK financial regulators; debates over whether it involves unregistered securities trading and whether investor protection is adequate have persisted.

In other words, Pump.fun has never been just a “tool”—it’s more like a “factory” mixing financial speculation, social dissemination, and anonymous culture. This also explains why every adjustment to “fees,” “incentives,” and “social structure” is amplified and interpreted by the market.

3. What’s changing with this new feature: Connecting creator fees to GitHub identities

The core of this update can be summarized in one sentence:

Users can now allocate creator fees directly to any GitHub account (via Pump.fun’s mobile app).

The significance isn’t just “whether it can be allocated,” but “to whom”: expanding the target from “on-chain wallets/roles within projects” to GitHub accounts essentially connects Pump.fun’s incentive chain to “the most commonly used developer identity system” in the developer world.

This could bring three potential changes:

Productizing actions that support developers: Many people want to tip open-source authors but lack a convenient way; Pump.fun embeds a “pay developers” button into high-frequency trading and token issuance scenarios.

Including external contributors in incentives: Not necessarily team members of projects, but anyone contributing tools, scripts, or community content could be “named” and allocated fees.

Enhancing narrative and social engagement: Linking meme coin attention to open-source developers makes it easier to frame it as “supporting builders” rather than just “speculation.”

The official mention of “adding more social features” also hints that Pump.fun is shifting from a “token issuance and trading platform” toward a “content/community platform.”

4. Why now: From “fee design experiments” to “more market-oriented distribution”

The reason for external attention is that this isn’t an isolated move but a continuation and refinement of Pump.fun’s recent experiments with fee structures.

In Pump.fun’s growth flywheel, “fees” have always been a key variable: the platform earns revenue through trading commissions and “graduation” mechanisms, then redistributes part of that income back into the ecosystem in various forms to drive more issuance and trading. Schemes like “Dynamic Fees” and “Project Ascend” have been widely discussed in the community, all aiming to solve the same core problem—how to sustain incentives for trading and issuance beyond short-term hype.

By opening the profit-sharing channel to GitHub, it’s a move to “support developers,” but also a more pragmatic strategy: connecting to the most developer-centric space to see if new users, narratives, and funds can be attracted.

5. Potential impacts: What does this mean for platform and token “fund flows”?

From a business and financial structure perspective, the biggest variable is whether creator fees will “spill over” outside the original closed loop.

· If this mechanism mainly brings “new users, new projects, new trading volume,” then the overall fee pool could expand, strengthening the growth flywheel, and Pump.fun can frame this as a “builder economy” positive feedback loop.

· But if it mainly redistributes existing fees, taking profits out of the system, then internal reflows might weaken, and the overall effect may not be as optimistic as the narrative suggests.

Of course, short-term markets tend to favor “stories”: using GitHub as the recipient endpoint reinforces Pump.fun’s association with “developers” and “open source,” giving it an extra narrative card among similar issuance platforms.

6. Risks and controversies won’t automatically disappear: Stronger social features ≠ lower risk

It’s important to emphasize that paying fees to GitHub doesn’t inherently mean a healthier ecosystem.

Pump.fun’s core issues remain on the supply side: too many new coins, very short lifecycles, fierce attention battles, and these mechanisms can easily trigger phenomena like “soft rug pulls,” “pump-and-dump,” and short-term emotional trading. While the platform can provide more information to help judgment, it cannot fundamentally eliminate speculation.

If Pump.fun continues to push “more social features,” it may evolve into a “content + financial assets” hybrid—this could increase user stickiness but also complicate content moderation, risk warnings, and compliance.

7. Conclusion: A pipeline to GitHub, behind which lies Pump.fun’s next narrative phase

Allocating creator fees to GitHub accounts may seem like a “small update,” but it reflects a clear trend for Pump.fun: moving from a simple “issuance and trading infrastructure” toward a product with more social attributes, emphasizing identities and networks.

The core question it seeks to answer is straightforward: in a cycle of meme coin frenzy and fatigue, how can Pump.fun transform from a “traffic factory” into a “sustainable ecosystem machine”?

The GitHub pipeline—connecting identities and developer assets—may be its strategic move to redefine its boundaries.