Khayrat Pump.Fun platform is a black hole of circular drift

Would you walk into a crowded college lecture hall, fart into the speaker, and blast “fartcoin” at the top of your lungs? If so – and if you have the means to document this adventure on video, preferably capturing the audience’s reaction – you can claim a reward of approximately $1,000.

The funds will, of course, be disbursed in Fartcoin, a meme cryptocurrency trading at just over 10 cents at press time, with a total market cap of about $130 million.

That’s the promise of Pump.Fun GO, a new feature on Pump.Fun, one of the fastest growing cryptocurrency companies in the past few years. It supposedly allows users to “pay anyone to do anything.” Cryptocurrency rewards are offered by individuals – or pooled from multiple wallets – and are held as collateral by Pump.Fun until the countdown clock runs out. Completing the mission should net you the prize; Creators get a refund if no one completes the task.

Pump.Fun, whose legal department did not return a request for comment, said without explaining its process, that it oversees and approves the offering of rewards as well as related collection claims. The initial wave of GO bounties included enticements to parachute into a World Cup match wearing a memecoin-themed costume and asking a black person to cover himself in watermelon and repeat the phrase “I’m your friend, watermelon man.”

The terms of service state that GO users are responsible for their “actions, decisions, wallet security, submissions, communications, and compliance with the law.” They also warn that the platform may remove content, suspend accounts, and cooperate with third-party authorities in cases of “fraud, fraud, market manipulation, infringement, piracy, scraping, abusive or illegal content, stolen property, illegal financial activity, or other harmful or prohibited conduct.” According to these terms, transfers of cryptocurrencies and rewards are “not guaranteed”.

The GO feature, which arrives as the platform faces a massive collapse in user engagement, appears to promise more accusations of lawlessness and deceptive practices for Pump.Fun, which is already a source of controversy. Many rewards, such as one that requests footage of a Mimcoin-themed car exploding in a ball of fire, are filled with AI-generated images provided as proof of a completed mission. The people actually running the challenge have no apparent recourse if someone else’s bid is chosen as the winner by Pump.Fun according to some unspecified backroom criteria.

The finer details can also complicate the picture: A $215 bonus titled “Go to McDonald’s and Get a Burger” specifies that the payout will be split among the first 20 valid entries, coming out to $10.75 each — less than most paid for their meal.

While this bounty is fairly standard, others that remain open at the moment are downright miserable, exploitative, or malicious. There are multiple requests for users to get the names of different cryptocurrencies tattooed on their bodies, and a man in India has already had one tattooed on his forehead for the equivalent of $3,000. (Video responses depicting people performing more degrading tasks often come from users in countries outside the United States.) You can record yourself begging a gas station attendant for a pill to help with your flaccid penis for about $100, interview several homeless people and ask them who they voted for ($700), or quit your job on camera ($3,000). The final message read: “Bonus points for style, creativity and chaos.” “This is your severance package.”

Andrew Ford Lyons, a technologist who works on digital security and safety projects for human rights groups and other organizations, tells WIRED that GO incentivizes coercion, harassment, significant physical and legal risks, and “capitalizes on inequalities” in online entertainment. “This is basically where the digital economy is headed,” he says.