Project Ascend

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Project Ascend
Image: official logo
announced	September 2, 2025
platform	pump.fun and PumpSwap
key component	Dynamic Fees V1
creator fee range	0.05 to 0.95 percent

Project Ascend is pump.fun's September 2025 creator economics overhaul, introducing dynamic tiered fees that pay token creators a share of trading revenue.

Contents

1 Background: creator revenue sharing
2 Dynamic Fees V1
3 Results
4 References

Project Ascend is the creator economics overhaul announced by pump fun on September 2, 2025. Its core component, Dynamic Fees V1, pays token creators a tiered share of trading fees on pumpswap, with the rate falling as a token's market capitalization rises. The company promoted it as delivering "10x creator earnings" and paired it with a tenfold speedup in processing community takeover (CTO) creator fee applications, which let communities that revive abandoned tokens claim the creator fee stream.

Background: creator revenue sharing

The program grew out of the May 12, 2025 creator revenue sharing initiative, in which pump.fun promised to share revenue with token creators. In practice that first version added a flat 0.05 percent creator fee on top of PumpSwap's 0.25 percent swap fee, which critics at SolanaFloor noted was funded by an extra charge on traders rather than out of existing platform revenue. Creator payouts started below $20,000 per day but grew quickly, at times exceeding $200,000 per day platform wide. The initiative was widely read as an answer to letsbonk fun and other rivals in the 2025 launchpad wars that were winning creators with more generous economics.

Dynamic Fees V1

Under Project Ascend, small tokens earn creators the highest rates, up to 0.95 percent per trade for tokens in roughly the 420 to 1,470 SOL market cap band, declining in tiers to as low as 0.05 percent as a token approaches valuations near $20 million. The design intentionally inverts the platform's incentives: a creator now earns the most by keeping a token alive and traded in its early stage, rather than by abandoning it and launching another. pump.fun framed the change as a way to discourage the throwaway launches, rug pulls and pump and dump behavior that dominated the trenches and depressed the platform's graduation rate.

Results

The launch had immediate measurable effects. Creators earned over $2.4 million in fees in the first 24 hours, about three times the total of the preceding six days. The upgrade contributed to a doubling of bonding curve volumes, helped pump.fun sustain daily fees above $2 million through late 2025, and was credited by analysts as one reason pump.fun recovered dominance from LetsBonk. The PUMP token rallied on the announcement. Streaming creators became direct beneficiaries as well, since pump fun livestreaming income was now tied to dynamic fees, the basis of the platform's creator capital markets pitch. Later refinements added creator controls, including a cap of one fee configuration change per token.

References

Category: Platforms