Onchain Cost Comparison: What if PumpFun Was a Rollup?

PumpFun has supercharged memecoin speculation and become one of crypto’s market-defining apps since its launch in early 2024.

PumpFun has also been a cash cow for Solana and its validators. In our recent Gas Guzzlers Report, we found that PumpFun transactions have accounted for 13% of gas usage on Solana from April 2024 to April 2025.

PumpFun’s growth has made it a flashpoint in the Ethereum versus Solana debate, with some asking if Ethereum’s decentralization focus hurts its ability to incubate high-usage apps like PumpFun, without high gas fees hurting user experience.

But that’s exactly the problem the rollup-centric roadmap is meant to solve. This begs the question: What would PumpFun’s onchain costs be if it ran as an Ethereum rollup? Our analysis suggests that PumpFun could wipe out nearly all its onchain costs as a rollup depending on its data availability (DA) setup, saving ten of millions of dollars. We’ll dive in below.

PumpFun background and usage on Solana

PumpFun makes it possible for anybody to launch their own memecoin and, if it draws enough interest from the community, create DEX lending pools so people can trade it . No coding skills required – just an idea and 0.02 SOL. 

By lowering the entry barrier of creating a token, PumpFun set off a memecoin trading boom. The app has facilitated hundreds of millions in trading volume, attracted over 400,000 active wallets, and made over $600 million in revenue. 

PumpFun cumulative revenue over time, from DeFiLlama

PumpFun has also become an important part of an ongoing debate around the values blockchains should optimize for, and the related debate of Ethereum versus Solana. Solana can process much more activity than Ethereum mainnet, but it’s also more centralized – its validator set is smaller, and most of those validators receive a significant share of their stake from the Solana Foundation. That raises questions around how decentralized the network truly is, and whether it can remain permissionless. 

On the other hand, Ethereum’s emphasis on decentralization and ensuring any user can run a node limits the throughput it can process as an L1. That causes higher fees during periods of congestion and makes it more difficult to host sophisticated, high-growth apps.

However, our analysis of PumpFun’s gas usage shows why so many see rollups as the answer to this problem for Ethereum. The data suggests that with its own Ethereum rollup, an app like PumpFun could run at its current throughput for less money than PumpFun pays in gas fees on Solana, while still getting Ethereum-like security guarantees.

PumpFun onchain costs: Solana protocol vs. Ethereum rollup

In the week-long period of April 22 through April 28 of 2025, PumpFun and its users have paid $2.7 million in gas fees. Analysis of PumpFun's Solana program (the equivalent of an Ethereum smart contract) show those transactions resulted in 48,768 MB of data processed onchain.

That means that as a Solana protocol, PumpFun is paying $55 per MB of data processed. That’s much less than what an app would pay on Ethereum mainnet. But not on an Ethereum rollup. Rollups don’t pay gas fees – they collect gas fees from users at levels they decide. Instead of gas, rollups pay DA costs to their host chain and in exchange benefit from that chain’s security guarantees and decentralization. 

Our previous research has found that rollups can pay as little as $0.81 per MB processed as an Ethereum L2 using Celestia for DA, or $0.04 per MB as an Arbitrum L3 using AnyTrust. Either setup would allow an app processing the same data load as PumpFun to cut costs by over 98%, saving more than $2.6 million during the time period we study.

PumpFun could pass some or all of those savings to users by not charging gas fees, or take them as revenue. 

For context, PumpFun has made $12.5 million in revenue during the one-week time period we study. The maximum projected savings of $2.7 million is roughly 22% of that figure – a margins increase few businesses would refuse.

Rollups can be cost-efficient for any use case

As our PumpFun analysis shows, rollups can greatly increase cost-efficiency for apps running on more performant L1s, while also allowing them to maximize decentralization on Ethereum. 

While there are other offchain costs associated with running rollups – primarily overhead related to running the chain and integrating partner technologies – those costs are fixed and predictable. Gas fees, on the other hand, are uncapped and unpredictable. And when they spike due to network congestion, transaction failures also tend to rise, harming user experience even more. 

That’s one of many reasons we’re bullish on rollups. They give apps the dedicated blockspace and customization to build the best experiences possible for their users, at low and controllable costs.

Are you building the next PumpFun? Contact Conduit to put it on its own dedicated rollup.