Memecoin issuing platform Pump.fun’s new bounty product has produced its first controversy.
A user post like Arivu on X said he ran a Pump.fun GO giveaway last week asking someone to tattoo the ticker “$boutywork” on their forehead and provide video proof. The task appeared to reference a token called $Bountywork, but the bounty description itself used the misspelled version “$boutywork.”
Arivu said he followed the task exactly.
“Guys I followed everything the name mentioned in the line,” he wrote on X, adding that it wasn’t his fault because he tattooed the exact name mentioned by the bounty creator. “Please, I gave my life,” he wrote.
The typo was then the market.
A Solana token using the ticker BOUTYWORK began trading on PumpSwap and rose to a market cap of over $600,000 shortly after going live. It grabbed over $3.5 million in volume in 24 hours, 2,630 holders and about $43,000 in liquidity.
Arivu later wrote that he had received $20,000, but from the trading fee for a token, someone had launched. He shared the token address and thanked the users, saying they had changed his life.
‘Pay someone to do something’
Pump.fun GO announced last week that it will let users create and complete bounties for almost any task. The company pitched it as a way to “pay anyone to do anything,” a line that sounds like Internet fun (and most of the gifts are light-hearted dares) until the task becomes more exploitative, such as permanent body modifications.
The backlash to the new platform came quickly.
An X user claimed to have spoken to the tattoo shop and alleged that the person who got the tattoo may have been taken advantage of by someone else trying to take advantage of the token’s price increase. A phone call to the tattoo shop made by CoinDesk went unanswered twice.
Nikita Bier, the widely followed product manager at X, was more direct:
“It’s sad that all the rich people left crypto and now the whole industry is just teenagers in America forcing poor people to do shameful things.”
The tattoo wasn’t the only task that pushed Pump.fun GO beyond the normal memecoin theater.
Other open bounties reviewed by CoinDesk showed how widespread the tours are. Some were silly Internet challenges, such as one that asked users to complete a watermelon-eating challenge in under 60 seconds for a reward pool of about $93.
Another offered about $663 for people to go to Los Angeles’ Skid Row, a 50-block neighborhood that contains one of the largest homeless populations known for its drug markets and extreme poverty, and interview two homeless people on camera about who they voted for.
But some started to become dangerous.
One bounty asked people to drink an entire bottle of alcohol while promoting a token, with videos showing multiple submissions of users appearing to chug bottles in about a minute.
Another offered about $266 for someone to shave their head while screaming “Jobcoin”.
This is where the exploitative nature of the memecoin frenzy comes into play.
Pump.fun GO turns attention into a bounty, the bounty into content, and the content into a token trade. The person doing the stunt may get a small payout. The creator can launch a coin around it and catch far more if the market catches on.
The more attention something gets, the more profit it can potentially generate.
To be clear, Pump.fun has no role in the types of streams users choose to create, and it has an active moderation team that removes dark or malicious content. Pump has moderated platform activity since it started.
CoinDesk has reached out to Pump.fun for comment.
However, this is not the first time that Pump.fun has found itself involved in controversial social experiments.
Previously, the platform had live streaming videos ranging from extreme dark humor to dark behavior, all in an effort to pump their tokens to a few million dollars in market cap.
By the time some of these streams went live, several videos that emerged, including suicide threats, death threats and a man constantly locked in his toilet, were disturbing to say the least.
And that makes the unpleasant part of this story.
On the one hand, this is the wild and crazy side of the crypto-internet: a typo, a bounty, a Solana token, a viral photo, and a chart that goes vertical before most people understand what happened.
On the other hand, as crypto pulls from a bear market and tries to be taken seriously by the masses, such stunts show how quickly memecoin incentives can hold back crypto’s reputation as a serious contender for everyday financial tracks.
