Pump Fun’s Token Gift Turned Into a Layoff Cliff: The Real Reason Staff Were Fired Before Vesting

Right now, I just saw a deleted X account start to fight for 40 people who no longer work at Pump Fun. Then it went quiet. Right now, there is also a token chart down 76% from an all-time high, a promised airdrop that has not landed in 365 days, and a UK holding company that is late on a filing that costs less than one fancy dinner in Nairobi. If you are reading this because you are holding PUMP, or because you are thinking about launching a memecoin on Pump Fun, I need you to understand something first. This is not just a story about a platform falling apart. It is a story about how token vesting is being used as a retention weapon—and some employees found out too late. The silence after the pump tells the real story. Let me be precise from the start. Crypto news outlet Sandmark obtained recordings and files about Pump Fun’s internal layoffs. The outlet reports that Pump Fun was able to grow its employee headcount to 100 this year. In March, a recording of a company meeting allegedly caught co-founder Noah Tweedale telling staff that layoffs were necessary because Pump Fun had grown too quickly and could no longer move “fast and rough.” Those are not just casual words. In crypto culture, “fast and rough” is a badge of honor for shipping hard and cutting hard. It means the product matters more than the people. It means the company will always choose speed over stability. In April, several employees were terminated. Many of those affected reportedly signed a token agreement in mid-June 2025 that would have seen a quarter of their Pump Fun tokens unlock two months later. That detail is absurd if you read it slowly. The company fired people in April. But those same people, or a meaningful subset of them, were still signing token agreements in June. Why would a company hand out token contracts to people it had just laid off? Why would an employee who had already been cut trust a token agreement that arrived after the termination email? There are two ways to read this mess. The first is that the company moved faster than usual: headcount first, paperwork later. The second is more cynical, but in crypto, the cynical reading is usually closer to the truth. Pump Fun may have kept those employees around in a state of limbo long enough to sign a token agreement, then used the agreement as a form of future compensation while removing their salaries. When the token unlock approached, they found they were no longer on the roster. An X account that claimed to be campaigning on behalf of laid-off Pump Fun employees has said that over 40 staff members have faced the chop in the last two months. The account’s owner says they were laid off just one day before the vesting period unlocked. One day. Not a week. Not a month. One day before the portion of the token grant would have become available. The same account says many employees were “treated like cattle.” Since then, the account has been restricted and one of its posts was deleted. I have seen this exact pattern before. In 2017, during the ICO era, I watched projects hand out “founder” and “advisor” tokens to people who were then pushed out before the lockup. The team kept the tokens. The employee kept a non-disclosure agreement and a feeling of having been used. The silence after the pump tells the real story. Context matters here because Pump Fun isn’t some anonymous liquidity pool. It is one of the most recognizable names in the memecoin industry. The platform took a simple idea—make it trivially easy to launch a memecoin—and turned it into a billion-dollar revenue machine. Users can create tokens, push them into a bonding curve, and wait for the “graduation” to a decentralized exchange. In exchange, Pump Fun takes a fee. Over time, those fees added up to more than $1 billion in cumulative revenue. A company with that kind of revenue should not be having trouble paying people. A company with that kind of revenue should not be late on a Companies House filing. But here we are. Pump Fun’s UK parent company is Baton Corporation. Sandmark spotted that Baton’s business accounts are overdue by at least one month. Companies House accounts dated up to 30 September 2025 have not been filed. The fine for being more than one month overdue is £375, which is about $505. Over three months, the penalty becomes £750, about $1,010. Over six months, the penalty reaches £1,500, around $2,020. For a firm with $1 billion in cumulative revenue, these fines are chump change. But the delayed filing is a signal. It tells you that the company’s internal processes are not as “fast and rough” in the right direction as the founder’s words suggested. It also tells you that no one is watching the back office closely enough to avoid a trivial compliance failure. At the same time, the PUMP token has dropped almost 76% from its all-time high in September. That is a brutal drawdown for any token, let alone one that belongs to the most successful memecoin infrastructure play of the cycle. A 76% decline means the market is not treating the token like a revenue share. It is treating it like a meme that has already been mined. Even with millions in revenue flowing through the platform, the token has no real buyback mechanism and no clear utility beyond being the native asset of a launchpad that can change its rules whenever it wants. The worst part is the airdrop. It has now been 365 days since Pump Fun promised that an airdrop was “coming soon.” That phrase, repeated for a full year, has stopped sounding like a roadmap and started sounding like an empty bottle tossed into the ocean. In a bull market, people forgive this. They are too busy chasing the next launch to ask where their free tokens ended up. But the employees who were laid off before their vesting period ask different questions. They ask whether they will ever see the payout they were promised. They ask whether the token agreement was real or just a piece of paper designed to keep them quiet. Let me share a technical observation based on my audit experience. When I review token distribution schedules, the first thing I look for is the cliff. In standard crypto compensation, a one-year cliff means you get nothing if you leave before twelve months, and you slowly earn tokens after that. A common structure is 25% at the cliff, then linear unlock over the following months or years. If an employee is fired one day before the cliff, the pending 25% is usually clawed back. The remaining 75% never starts. In plain English, the employee loses not just the near-term quarter but the entire future schedule. That is not a severance package. It is a token trap. Another thing I look for is the distinction between “vested” and “unvested” tokens. Unvested tokens are not owned by the employee. They are promises. They are hopes. They are subject to forfeiture provisions, board discretion, and sometimes plain old bad faith. The problem on many memecoin platforms is that employees are not treated like traditional staff. They are treated like early token contributors. They are given an allocation instead of a salary, or a salary supplemented by an allocation, and told to be grateful. In 2020, during DeFi Summer, I watched the same dynamic play out with liquidity miners. Projects subsidized yield, attracted capital, and then turned off the faucet. When the rewards stopped, the users vanished. Employee token programs work the same way. The token is the farm, and the employees are the farmers. If the farm fires you before harvest, the yield stays in the treasury. The conversation about AI and crypto layoffs is worth unpacking. Many crypto companies have cut staff this year. Coinbase announced in May that it would lay off 14% of its workforce, blaming market conditions and the desire to incorporate AI. Gemini let go of 25% of its staff in February, also citing AI changes. Jack Dorsey’s Block fired about half of its workforce, around 4,000 people, and blamed AI as well. The AI narrative is convenient: machines will do the job, so the people are no longer needed. But Pump Fun did not use the AI excuse. It said “grew too quickly.” That is almost honest in its bluntness. It is also revealing, because a company that grows too quickly can usually slow down, reorganize, or adjust hiring targets. It does not usually fire dozens of people right before a token unlock unless the token unlock itself is the issue. Let’s talk about what is actually new here. The broad fact that layoffs happen in crypto is not news. The fact that employees are last in line after token holders is not news. But the timing of Pump Fun’s cuts, combined with the mid-June token agreement, the two-month unlock schedule, the one-day-before-vesting claim, and the overdue Companies House filing, creates a pattern that deserves more scrutiny than a single headline. New information from the Sandmark report suggests that token agreements were signed after the first round of layoffs. That is the opposite of normal startup behavior. In a normal company, you sign a retention agreement when you want people to stay. You do not hand out token agreements to people you are about to exit. Unless, of course, the agreement itself is a way of moving the cost from cash to tokens. Put another way, the company may have fired people, then offered them a token agreement as a consolation prize, knowing full well that the tokens would not unlock until after a vesting period that the ex-employees were no longer working to complete. That is not accidental. That is structural cruelty. I want to pause here and share something personal. I work from Nairobi, and I have covered crypto long enough to see the same stories repeat with different logos. During the ICO era, I sprinted to cover Paragon Coin, a project that promised to bring payments to unbanked Kenyans. My male colleagues dismissed it as vaporware. I went to the physical meetup, interviewed the founders off the record, and found a real integration story. I published within 48 hours. But I also saw how the ICO team treated its local employees: token-heavy packages, vague vesting terms, and a culture of fear around asking questions. The employees wanted to believe. They told me they were building the future. When the token crashed, they were left with nothing. I have carried that lesson with me ever since. Speed matters in news, but verification matters more. And when a company’s own staff cannot verify their token payout, the whole project is suspect. What should employees do with an agreement like this? First, read the forfeiture clause. Most token agreements contain language that says unvested tokens are forfeited upon termination for any reason. If you are terminated without cause, ask whether your unvested tokens accelerate. Ask whether the company has to buy back your tokens at a fair price. Ask whether the token allocation is held by a separate entity, because if it is held by the parent company, the parent can move the goalposts whenever it wants. You should also ask yourself a simpler question: why would a company that made $1 billion in revenue not simply pay you cash? There is a contrarian angle that no one in the comments section will want to address. What if the Pump Fun layoffs were not just cost cutting? What if they were token supply management? If the company had a large pool reserved for employees, and a meaningful share of those employees were gone before the first unlock, then the tokens that would have gone to those employees are either returned to the treasury or redistributed to new hires. That reduces future sell pressure. In a complicated way, it helps the token price. It makes the token scarce in a way that the public never sees. It also punishes the people who helped build the platform, but in crypto, that is often a feature, not a bug. Consider the token’s trading context. PUMP reaches its all-time high in September. Two months later, the market begins to trade lower. The token eventually falls 76%. If the company had let all those terminated employees receive their token unlocks in August, they might have sold the news, adding more supply on the way down. By firing them a day before the unlock, the company avoids both the cash and the selling pressure. The token holders’ pain is slightly reduced. The employees’ pain is total. If you are a pure economist, you might call that rational. If you are a journalist who has seen what this does to people, you call it predatory. The deleted X account is also a clue. In crypto, people do not usually delete their complaints because they got bored. They delete them because lawyers called, or because a settlement offer landed, or because they realized that continuing to fight a well-funded legal entity could ruin them. The account’s owner was laid off one day before vesting. That is the kind of wound that wants to be public. The fact that the account went quiet suggests that either the claim was not entirely solid or the pressure to shut up was very strong. I have seen both in my career. I have also seen how quickly the internet forgets a deleted post. But deleted posts leave metadata, screenshots, and memories. The silence after the pump tells the real story. I keep coming back to the phrase “treated like cattle.” Cattle are moved when they are useful. They are fed until the price is right. And they are sold before the cost of feeding them exceeds their value. If you work at a memecoin platform, you should not be surprised if the same logic applies to your employment contract. The only way to protect yourself is to treat the token agreement like a professional instrument, not a friendship bracelet. Get independent legal advice. Put the token address in writing. Ask for your allocation in a smart contract that you can verify on-chain. If a founder says “trust me, we’ll sort it out later,” you have already heard your answer. This is not legal advice, but I have sat through enough regulatory roundtables to know that employee token agreements are a growing target. In traditional finance, deferred compensation is heavily regulated. In crypto, the rules are still being written. Regulators are increasingly interested in whether tokens distributed to employees are actually securities. They are also interested in whether companies are using layoffs to circumvent vesting rights. A company that fires employees one day before a token unlock is essentially telling the world that it does not respect the difference between earned labor and speculative upside. That is the kind of fact that can turn into a class action. What about the platform’s users? They should care because Pump Fun’s token is the same asset that fuels their portfolio. If the platform treats its own staff badly, it will treat retail users even worse. The airdrop that was supposed to arrive “soon” has been missing for a year. The company’s accounts are overdue. The team’s explanation for layoffs is shorter than a tweet. These are not unrelated facts. They are all symptoms of the same underlying disease: a culture that treats commitments as optional and people as optional too. I have tried to keep this article grounded in what the reporting actually says. Sandmark’s investigation found recordings of a March meeting where Tweedale said the company grew too quickly and needed to be fast and rough. Sandmark says employees were terminated in April. It says many of those affected signed token agreements in mid-June 2025, with a quarter of the tokens unlocking two months later. A now-restricted X account claims more than 40 people have been cut and that the account’s owner was fired one day before vesting. Baton Corporation’s accounts are overdue. The token has fallen 76%. The airdrop is 365 days late. I am not here to tell you that every claim is an absolute fact. I am here to tell you that the metadata of this story is staggering. The real news is not that Pump Fun fired people. It is that the company went out of its way to keep the employee token allocation in its own hands right before the first unlock. That is the kind of behavior you expect from a sketchy anonymous team, not from a platform that has become a core part of the Solana memecoin ecosystem. So what happens next? The next watch is not the token chart. The next watch is the Companies House register. If Baton Corporation files its overdue accounts within days, that tells you the company is just sloppy. If it continues to hide, ask why. The next watch is also the deleted X account. People who have been wronged do not always stay quiet. Screenshots last longer than hasty deletions. The next watch is the class action. One former employee with a paper trail and a good lawyer can force the company to reveal its token schedule, its termination decisions, and its parent company’s financial records. I also want to say something to the retail investor who is still dreaming of the next Pump Fun coin. Ask one question before you ape into any project: who gets the tokens behind the scenes? If the answer is “insiders” and “future employees,” then you need to know when those unlocks happen. If you see the word “vesting,” do not just assume that the team is waiting patiently. They are waiting to sell. If they can fire employees a day before the cliff, imagine what they will do to you after the next hype cycle. The foundation of this industry is supposed to be transparency. Code is law. Blockchain explorers are public. Wallets can be traced. Airdrops can be promised with actual transactions. But stories like this one remind us that the gap between the code and the human is still massive. The blockchain may not lie, but the people in charge can still choose when to walk away from the promises they made to the people who built their empire. In 2020, I covered the DeFi Summer by spending hours in Uniswap’s governance forums and Discord channels. I wrote a viral thread called “The People’s Exchange” because I felt the pain of retail users who were being priced out by gas fees. The same emotional energy is here now. The people who built Pump Fun are being priced out by management decisions. The difference is that they are not being priced out by gas fees. They are being priced out by token terms that they may not have fully understood. I want to end with a question, not a summary. If a platform can generate over $1 billion in revenue, launch thousands of memecoins, and still not find a way to honor its own employee token agreements, what does that say about the long-term value of the tokens it launches? When the platform’s own staff are treated like random liquidity providers, the retail user has no reason to expect better. The next time you see “airdrop coming soon,” remember the phrase. It has a ghost. That ghost is the unvested token allocation of the people who built the machine while nobody was looking. The silence after the pump tells the real story.