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On Sept. 17, a crypto trader said that he had been “rugged by a disabled dev” behind a memecoin called 120 Hours (120), launched on a popular Solana-based memecoin launchpad Pump.fun.
In a post shared by X user, who goes by the pseudonym @Evecoins, seen by thousands, the user claimed the developer said he had only 120 hours to live, that trading fees would go to his family, and that he didn’t know what a rug pull was. Then liquidity was drained, the dev went offline, and the coin evaporated.
A rug pull is a type of crypto scam where project developers suddenly drain liquidity from their token’s trading pool. This leaves investors unable to sell, causing the token’s value to collapse. It’s common in memecoin launches where trust and transparency are low.
The project page on Pump.fun also carried the same bio:
Before collapse, data on Pump.fun showed an all-time high market cap of about $534,300, but by the time the rug pull was reported, the dev had reportedly emptied trading volume and the X account vanished.
What is Pump.fun, and how it became viral
Pump.fun is a Solana-based meme coin launchpad that lets anyone create and immediately trade tokens under launch terms like no presales, minimal technical setup required. The site launched on Jan. 19, 2024, founded by three entrepreneurs, Noah Tweedale, Alon Cohen, and Dylan Kerle.
From its beginning, Pump.fun’s growth was rapid. By early 2025, the platform was generating millions of dollars in fees per month.
It became known for its ease of launching meme coins, combined with strong social virality where users share tokens, streams highlight new launches, and the meme culture amps up visibility. Data from Dune, an on-chain analytics platform shows Pump.fun made $850 million to date in fees.
Usage metrics confirm that Pump.fun had tens of millions of user interactions by mid-2025. Another Dune dashboard shows over 25.25 million addresses have interacted with Pump.fun tokens ecosystem-wide. However, only a fraction “graduate”, meaning they leave the bonding curve and gain liquidity.
In August alone, 604,162 tokens were launched but just 4,510 graduated, a 0.75% success rate. Across 2025, graduation rates hover below 2%, most Pump.fun coins fail to sustain beyond launch.
The “120 Hours” incident
The sob story about terminal illness appears to have been part of the promotional hook. Evecoins says that the dev even claimed not to know what a rug pull was.
Data from Pump.fun at peak showed giveaway market capitalization in six figures, then rapid loss of liquidity. Community threads on X picked up the story quickly, with many posting warnings. The token’s twitter/X profile disappeared, taking with it the bio and visibility.
Pump.fun’s model has enabled many such episodes. According to Dune data, a large share of accounts that interacted with Pump.fun tokens are currently operating at a loss. One study found that about 60% of wallet addresses on Pump.fun are losing money. Of those, over 1,700 addresses suffered losses of more than $100,000 each; 46 wallets reported losses above $1 million.
Profits are heavily skewed. Very few addresses record gains over six or seven figures; most wallets lose nearly all value after token price crashes.
This article has been published in thestreet.com via Yahoo News.
