The post Pump.fun suspends livestream feature amid backlash appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. The Solana memecoin launchpad pump.fun faced backlash over the weekend after a number of violent and unsavory livestreams on the platform started making the rounds on social media. By Monday afternoon, its livestream feature had been temporarily deactivated.  The offending streams ranged from token launchers threatening to commit violent acts unless a coin’s price goes up to racist or disgusting content meant to create viral shock value and juice the token’s price. This all happened as pump.fun booked staggering $14.3 million in revenue on Saturday, according to a pump.fun dashboard, nearly tripling its previous high.  Pump.fun is no stranger to edgy content. The site has drawn comparisons to the anonymous forum site 4chan for its often-unhinged content and lax approach to moderation. Before this current wave of disturbing livestreams, pump.fun had a large number of racially insensitive or pornographic tokens, none of which are subject to content moderation. But as disturbing livestreams went viral on X, pump.fun’s anonymous founder alon wrote that the platform would work to protect users from seeing “repulsive/dangerous content.” In a separate thread, alon said pump had taken down a stream of a user threatening to shoot their dog unless a token’s market capitalization increased, noting that the platform has now taken down “hundreds of streams.” A little after 2:00 p.m., pump.fun disabled livestreams on the platform altogether. In a blog post shortly after, pump.fun cited “unprecedented growth” as the key challenge to content moderation before adding that livestreams would be paused “for an indefinite time period.” This feels like an inflection point for a platform that has separated itself as the most viral application on Solana, booking nearly $250 million in revenue since launching. Largely on the back of memecoin activity emanating from…

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Filed under: News - @ November 25, 2024 9:19 pm