Insider Allegations Sour Pump.fun Acquisition as Premarket $PUMP Trades at a 35% Premium

As the hours count down towards pump.fun’s historic ICO, the polarizing launchpad has announced its acquisition of kolscan, a wallet-tracking app.

However, pump.fun’s first acquisition was marred by claims of insider trading among KOLs, who were able to frontrun the official announcement as rumors swept through the trenches.

Meanwhile, the platform’s eagerly awaited native token, $PUMP, has caught an optimistic bid in premarket perps, trading at a premium to its ICO price. 

Pump.fun Announces First Acquisition

On July 10, mere days before its $1.3B ICO, pump.fun announced its acquisition of wallet-tracking app kolscan. According to the pump.fun 𝕏 account, the acquisition allows for “totally new experiences that will change the entire onchain trading landscape”.

The acquisition came as something of a surprise to the Solana community. When pump.fun co-founder alon declared earlier in the week that pump.fun had acquired an external company, social media commentators assumed “it would have been more down the content/streaming/media /entertainment route”, as opposed to a crypto native application.

Pump.fun advocates have championed the move, suggesting that kolscan “adds transparency to the trenches”.

Allegations of Insider Trading Permeate Solana Trenches

The announcement caused a flurry of trading activity surrounding kolscan’s native token, which originally launched via the pump.fun launchpad in November 2024. 

Following pump.fun’s confirmation of the acquisition, $kolscan exploded in DeFi markets, soaring over 5,100% within an hour, witnessing $31M in hourly trading volume and spiking to a new all-time high of $22M. $kolscan quickly returned those gains to the market, crashing back to find support at a market capitalization of around $4M.

Naturally, blockchain sleuths wasted no time looking for insider wallets that made outsized profits from the move, netting over $220k profits in 22 hours after purchasing $kolscan 22 hours ago.

Other Solana KOLs highlighted the irony of the kolscan app showcasing a high number of influential traders taking $kolscan positions leading up to the announcement.

However, memecoin traders have refuted these allegations, claiming that similarities between the tweeting behavior of the kolscan account and the main pump.fun were enough to kickstart a rumor mill surrounding the acquisition.

$PUMP Trading Above ICO Price

With the $PUMP ICO set to go live tomorrow, July 12, sentiment towards the token is mixed. Much of the Solana community is bearish on the asset and its ICO due to fierce competition from letsBONK, an emerging rival that recently flipped pump.fun in market share.

However, onchain markets suggest otherwise. Phantom’s new perpetual service indicates that $PUMP is currently exchanging hands at $0.0053 in premarket trading, around 35% higher than its ICO price of $0.004. Onchain data suggests that premarket $PUMP has witnessed over $96M of trading volume in the last 24 hours, suggesting ample speculation on the asset’s coming launch.

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