Onchain Crypto Infra Shines in PUMP Premarket Trading and ICO

Executive Summary

Pump.fun's initial coin offering (ICO) and the surrounding pre-market activity marked a potential inflection point for onchain infrastructure, as Hyperliquid and Solana not only kept pace with centralized exchanges but outperformed them in liquidity, reliability, and accessibility.

As demand spiked for one of the most anticipated token launches of the year, Hyperliquid emerged as the dominant pre-market venue to trade PUMP while Solana processed a $500 million raise with zero downtime. Taken together, these events offer a glimpse into what fully onchain capital markets look like, and why they are poised to become the default.

Hyperliquid Dominates PUMP Pre-Markets

Pre-markets for PUMP launched on July 10, starting with Hyperliquid and quickly followed by most major centralized and decentralized exchanges. These pre-markets allowed users to speculate on the token's price ahead of its official listing. Hyperliquid rapidly emerged as the dominant venue.

At its peak, Hyperliquid's open interest (OI) on the PUMP pre-market exceeded $480 million, making it the fifth largest perpetual futures market on the platform, trailing only BTC, ETH, HYPE, and SOL. By contrast, Binance's pre-market OI peaked at $180 million and Bybit's at $71 million. Combined, the two largest CEXs fell short of Hyperliquid's OI. Other centralized exchanges (CEXs) and decentralized exchanges (DEXs) failed to attract meaningful volumes. While full historical data is lacking, PUMP's pre-market performance likely marks the largest open interest ever recorded for a token pre-launch.

Hyperliquid's dominance in the PUMP pre-market highlights deeper structural advantages it boasts as a blockchain:

• Onchain-native user base; Pump.Fun's community is inherently comfortable operating onchain, giving Hyperliquid a natural edge as the default exchange to trade PUMP.

• Competitive fees and airdrop potential: Traders were lured by trading fees on par with those of CEXs and the prospect of future Hyperliquid airdrops.

• Streamlined Solana onboarding: Integrations with interoperability solutions including Unit and deBridge allow for easy bridging from Solana and EVM chains.

• Product integrations: Popular Telegram-native trading tools such as PVP.Trade, Bullpen, and Pocket Protector enabled memecoin traders to pivot from meme to perpetuals trading directly in the app.

• Phantom wallet integration; Following last week's announcement, Phantom users can now trade Hyperliquid perpetuals directly through their wallets, opening direct access to 15 million monthly average users.

• KYC-free onboarding; While Hyperliquid imposes geographic restrictions, the absence of traditional know-your-customer requirements drastically reduces barriers to entry compared to regulated CEXs.

However, there were other reasons for the surge in OI. While it increased the scope of users able to trade the premarket, Pump.Fun is one of the most successful onchain products to launch in crypto's history and the token generation event was the most widely anticipated launch this year. Interest was compounded by an improvement in broader market sentiment as bitcoin hit new all-time highs. Additionally, a portion of the PUMP ICO allocation was sold in a private sale to institutional investors, who likely sought to hedge their low entry point via pre-market perps. Retail traders, expecting access through the public sale, likely joined in this trade as well. While it is impossible to quantify the exact impact of these hedgers, they undoubtedly contributed to the larger-than-normal OI.

Hyperliquid's performance, however, underscores its ascent in the race against centralized exchange competitors. While it has yet to overtake CEXs in total open interest or volume, it is steadily gaining ground. Hyperliquid's volume now equals 15.2% of aggregate perps volume and 4.5% of aggregate open interest across all major CEXs.

(Hyperliquid OI and Volume vs CEXs, source: Hyperflows)

Solana Performance Stands Out During Pump.Fun ICO

While Hyperliquid dominated premarket action, Solana served as the primary venue for the June 12 ICO itself. Initially planned as a three-day event aimed at distributing $500 million worth of PUMP tokens, the ICO sold out in less than 15 minutes. Participants could access the sale through multiple venues, including the Pump.Fun website and major centralized exchanges such as Bybit, KuCoin, and Kraken. Regardless of the access point, all participants had to register and complete KYC verification prior to the token sale. Remarkably, over $452 million of the $500 million allocation, more than 90%, was purchased on Solana through the Pump.Fun site rather than CEX frontends. While the CEXs have yet to issue a full post-mortem, numerous users of such platforms reported being unable to access the sale. One exchange cited "system constraints"; there has also been unconfirmed speculation of issues with how the Pump.Fun team distributed allocations.

(Pump.Fun ICO distribution on July 12. Source: Pump.Fun website)

Users who bought PUMP through the Pump.Fun frontend, facilitated directly on the Solana blockchain, faced no issues. Of the 23k+ wallets that KYC'd on Pump.Fun, a healthy 42% were able to access the sale. And while chain ingress, or demand to use the network, doubled to tripled throughout the sale, average fees only spiked to $0.03 and median fees $0.02 for a few moments while block propagation continued unaffected.

For those who have been following Solana closely over the past year, this smooth execution should not come as a surprise. The network has shown significant improvements in throughput, reliability, and fee stability thanks to continuous architectural upgrades, all while handling unprecedented levels of activity. Local fee markets, which allow fees to be isolated to specific accounts or applications, reduce congestion spillover and keep the broader network unaffected during localized activity spikes. Solana's switch to the QUIC protocol for transaction ingress has dramatically reduced the number of dropped packets at the networking level and alleviated spam congestion. Combined with stake-weighted quality of service, these changes ensure that high-value, valid transactions can be prioritized even during periods of intense load. Collectively, these changes helped Solana achieve over 15 months of continuous uptime, the longest period ever since its mainnet beta launch in 2020.

Looking ahead, Solana performance should continue to improve with several major upgrades on the way. Alpenglow, a consensus-layer rewrite, targets finality under 150 milliseconds while slashing validator costs. Firedancer, Jump Crypto's validator client, is designed for ultra-high throughput, with the goal of hitting 1 million transactions per second. Complementing these is DoubleZero, a decentralized fiber-optic network that bypasses the public internet by delivering low-latency, high-bandwidth connections for validator communication.

Meanwhile, Solana developers plan to increase block sizes and further down the road are working to implement multiple concurrent leaders, boosting parallelization and overall throughput. Finally, upcoming zero-knowledge (ZK) compression and light-client support should reduce state bloat and enable secure, mobile-native access. Together, these upgrades signal Solana's transition from a high-performance chain to true web-scale financial infrastructure.

Internet Capital Markets Are Becoming a Reality

Together, the PUMP premarket trading and ICO suggest a sea change in crypto market structure. Put simply, CEX infrastructure may no longer be the crutch crypto needs to facilitate large-scale activity. Hyperliquid's outsized share of pre-launch OI reinforces its role as a performant onchain trading venue that can rival CEX counterparts in liquidity and usability. Solana's ability to flawlessly manage a $500 million raise is a complete role reversal from just a year ago when large-scale meme trading tanked the networking layer to the frustration of many.

Developments since secondary trading began on Monday only reinforce this dynamic. While it has been less than 24 hours since PUMP opened for public trading, spot volumes on Hyperliquid and Solana so far exceed those of major CEXs that have listed it so far.

Fully onchain capital markets are no longer merely competitive with their centralized counterparts. They are starting to show signs of being able to outcompete them. As regulatory clarity improves over the coming year and onchain issuance expands to include all forms of financial vehicles, we expect this trend to not only continue but accelerate.