Invest1 publisher2 min readPublished
Pump.fun scraps a seven-month-old trader rebate to pay holders several times an hour
Pump.fun cited community feedback that Cashback still favoured creators of tokens whose development teams had gone, so new launches now choose between paying the team and paying whoever holds the token.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Pump.fun said on September 12 that it is adding a Holder Rewards token type and fully deprecating Cashback mode for any new token launch on the Solana memecoin launchpad.
- Cashback dated only to February 2026, when the platform introduced it to redirect creator fees away from developers and toward the traders actually moving volume.
- Existing Cashback tokens stay tradable under their original rules, and holders can still claim rewards they have already accrued.
Compiled by The InvestorSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- exposure Between payouts the fees sit in a wallet Pump.fun controls, so for that interval a holder's claim is on the platform rather than on the trade that produced the fee.
- decision Every new launch now settles the fee question once at launch, team or holders, and a creator who wants some of each has no configuration for it.
- precedent Making conversion permanent turns the payout rule into a fixed term of the token, so anyone buying a converted token is buying that rule with it.
- constraint A roughly $20 floor for maximising rewards keeps the smallest wallets from meaningfully participating, concentrating the redistributed fee in larger balances.
Cashback paid for executing a trade, and it returned the fee to the active trader at once [4]. Holder Rewards pays for a balance. The same fee now goes into a dedicated Pump.fun distribution wallet that pays token holders several times an hour, with a bigger share going to wallets that hold more and hold longer [3].
Several times an hour is a short leash. Two distributions an hour puts 30 minutes between payouts, so a wallet that buys, waits for one distribution and sells has done the thing the rule pays for [10]. A holding threshold of about $20 appears to be needed to maximise rewards [8], and I would expect wallets sized to that threshold, held across a single interval, to be the first way this gets worked.
The stated reason for the change is about who the fee reaches. According to the community feedback Pump.fun cited in its announcement, many of the highest-volume tokens no longer had development teams behind them, and Cashback in those cases still benefited creators disproportionately relative to the traders in the token every day [11]. That is a distribution complaint. Nothing in the account says the rebate was purchasing turnover that would not otherwise have happened.
The rebate ran from February 2026 to the September 12 announcement, which is about seven months from launch to deprecation for new tokens [9]. Creator fees were pointed at traders, and now they are pointed at holders [2][3].
Conversion runs one way. An existing Cashback or Creator Fee token has to meet objective criteria set by the platform before it can move, and once it moves there is no reverting [6].
What would settle the question is volume on new launches now that a new launch cannot offer a rebate at all [1]. If per-token volume on Holder Rewards launches sits near what the Cashback cohort did, the rebate was not what the trading was for, and this is a feature creators can market. If it falls off, Cashback was buying turnover with the creator's fee, and the platform has chosen to stop. A third path is duller and at least as likely: creators keep picking the standard Creator Fee token, since there is no hybrid on offer [5], and Holder Rewards stays a minority setting. Crypto Briefing's account of the announcement does not include volume or fee revenue figures [12].
What to watch
- Whether Pump.fun publishes per-token volume for Holder Rewards launches against the Cashback cohort.
- The objective criteria for conversion, and how many existing Cashback tokens clear them.
- Whether new creators keep choosing the standard Creator Fee token over Holder Rewards.