Introduction

There isn't a Solana meme coin trader who hasn't yet heard of the historic events that took place yesterday. The now notorious developer Stacc exploited meme coin behemoth Pump Fun from the inside, causing chaos within the community and forcing the site to shut down for the better part of the day.

Some heralded Stacc as a hero, calling him the Robin Hood of Crypto, while others questioned his motives, anxiously awaiting to see what would happen with the time and funds they'd invested in affected projects.

While we can only take Stacc's word on what really happened, everyone deserves the chance to tell their story. We were privileged to hear him speak to thousands of listeners throughout the day via several Twitter Spaces.

Here is a summary of those conversations based on notes from the Mag of Meme team.

Q&A

Listener question

A lot of us who fuck with Pump Fun, we can't use it right now, right? So, it highlighted something that was wrong but at the same time other people are affected. Why not just make Pump Fun aware of any exploits or flaws as opposed to doing it how you did?

Stacc

So I'll answer this in three portions.

First, I was on the team. I flew to the UK and I've been working in the same building as them for weeks now. I made them aware of this because anyone said any employee could do this, if they wanted to, at any point.

The second point is, I guess, I didn't want to ask for a bounty because fuck it, I didn't want anything out of this.

And third, I just want to kind of kill Pump Fun because it's something to do. It's inadvertently hurt a lot of people for a long time. And it was just going to get worse, in my opinion. But again, I shouldn't be like a vigilante, I guess. But they were going to kill themselves eventually just the way things were going. I don't know if I'm going to comment more on the track.

Listener question

How have they harmed people? I haven't experienced this. Maybe people experienced that in crypto in terms of losing. And I think that's pretty much for any crypto people when it lose. So how specifically were they harming people?

Stacc

So I'll answer that with my own experience, being an employee of Pump for the last few weeks. It was a horrible, disadvantaged company and it was going to explode in flames one way or another. So I just wanted to do it early before they managed to do it themselves and cause a lot more damage than whatever downtime you might see right now.

Listener question

Why did you pull the trigger? Did they backstab you? Did they not pay you? What happened over there? I guess there were bad people, but what did they do?

Stacc

It's just a long story of personal grievances.

I don't think any of these particular people are aware of what it's like to come from absolutely nothing and have no money in their bank account and not be able to do anything. Or even make rational decisions. They're not aware of the trap and what the trap lifestyle is.

Just like the tweet says, they could have paid everybody that was working there, and there would have been no harm, no foul.

I talked to a few other teams who took video calls with them, interviews and stuff. And it kind of seemed that the teams are all a bit suspicious of it. Maybe Pump Fun has sinister motives.

Listener question

So Pump Fun is a bad user experience, especially if you're trying to onboard people into crypto. There's nothing warning you like, hey, this is really dangerous. And also there's no metrics of if the dev has done something bad. What do you think about that?

Stacc

Two points I'll make. The second point has been brought up pretty well by everybody. And it was actually tweeted by me a while ago that there should just be easy metrics on things like the amount of delta that a particular dev has taken on other coins, right? Because it would actually absolve a lot of devs.

For instance, you'll see I have maybe 13 pages of coins, but I barely made money on any of them. I made my mistake on one of them and like bought back into the curve. That's true.

But if there is this goal of decentralization and making this cheap and easy for everyone, it would be nice to have that stat readily available, right? People will get around it, obviously, by just making new wallets and rugging again. But there should be steps to make the good guys look better.

Listener question

Are you not worried about going to jail or anything right now?

Stacc

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I am. I'm pretty sure there is a fairly high chance of it. We'll see what happens. It's better than sleeping with roaches and mice. Given the opportunity of not doing that, I will not do that.

Listener question

You did cost a lot of people a lot of fucking money all around the world. How do you feel about that?

Stacc

I'll start with this. The bonding curves that were emptied were not full yet. They were somewhere between being completely new and completely filled.

However, the majority of the money that was redirected would have been stuff that's just locked as TVL. And nobody's touched it in however long. I'm sure somebody could eventually do the math on this because I have no idea how much was redirected

I guess my point is I'm kind of ambivalent.

Listener question

Do you think the Pump Fun is gonna come back?

Stacc

I really don't know. It depends on how much is missing, and whether or not they wanna cover it out of the treasury. Somebody mentioned $400 million in revenue. I'm not entirely sure.

They have money in the bank. They can do with it what they like, I don't know. The answer is probably, or maybe. I don't know, I really don't know. I'm sure there's a lot of doubt in their security as a whole right now.

Listener question

You say you did it because of security, like they had private keys hard-coded in GitHub and stuff like that. What made you wanna just do it—I mean, you obviously knew the consequences of what could happen?

Stacc

I’ll explain my last 48 hours of existence.

So, I had been looking for flats because I wanted to move to London. I was fully in support of relocating to be part of this project, and part of this revolution, I guess, or just part of the culture.

And so there's a number of other people that flew from other countries to do trials. So, I'm on an extended trial here.

So, I've had like three advances so far. By the way, I've been working there for like nine weeks. Either way, the last advance wasn't even an advance, actually none of them were really advances, they just paid me out partially what I worked that month.

So, I asked for an advance, and then eventually I said you should just give a bonus to everybody so it doesn't look like you treated me special, and I got shot down.

I'm just gonna say fuck that, and do what I feel, and I have been feeling this is the right thing to do since I figured out that this actually could possibly happen, and told them all about it. I warned the CTO weeks ago.

So, to be fair, I warned them, and to be fair, I'm not having that shit. The trajectory of what was to come next for Pump, it's slightly disgusting, and the way they handle everything, well, I don't want to be part of it.

Listener question

I understand there's an exploit with Pump Fun and all that, but for a lot of us in the space, it has probably been one of the best things that came to us and helped us print money. Why pull the plug on the printer?

Stacc

I’ll tell you what I said to my sister and brother in China a while, like a number of weeks ago.

So it's a quote from a fucking, I don’t remember. Fuck it. The real evil isn't evil, it's the good men that stand behind me nothing.

I don't mind taking money from people that, gamble, I guess. Sorry. I'm sorry, not sorry.

There's also honest devs launching on Pump Fun. We can't put them all in one basket. A lot of people can't afford bundling or whatever tools that are deemed necessary in order to launch a coin and Pump Fun made it easy.

I wanna say this, at least. I figured out money a long fucking time ago. It's really easy to make money. Just find the next big thing. And that's about it. Just be a little bit precious about it and find what pops up. Do some research and figure out the tools underneath the thing, right?

Listener question

I've been hearing some interesting allegations about the amount of money that Pump Fun has been telling people they are taking is significantly different to what they were actually taking.

Stacc

I can tell you that there was a 1% fee that was fixed by the buyers and sellers a couple of weeks ago. And then on top of that, I don't know if this is public knowledge or not, but it's on the blockchain. Anybody can find it. On a migration, they take a 10 SOL fee.

Listener question

Because I haven't heard all the story, did it start from internal beef? What was the intention behind the exploits?

Stacc

It's a much longer story. It's a series of personal grievances from working there as well as overall different things.

I just wanted to make sure to do right by my morals. I've been tossing and turning every night. But the worst of things got to me, I will admit. The more I felt this the more I wanted to fuck it up. So here I am, I fucked it up.

Conclusion

While this is far from capturing everything that was said by Stacc on this historic day, it should give you a glimpse into the mind and morals of the man who rugged Pump Fun and sent Solana meme coin maxis scrambling for answers.