On Thursday evening, Apple delisted Pump Fun’s iPhone app in several countries. Shortly after the memecoin trading platform vanished from App Stores in the US and India, the disappearance began trending on social media.
In its last post before the delisting, Pump Fun’s social media account promised a “memecoin supercycle that retires everyone reading this.”
The timing of Apple’s delisting action was also one day after Pump Fun unveiled Custom Pairs, allowing anyone to launch a memecoin quoted against tokenized stocks.
Whether or not asset pairs are legal — a contentious topic ever since Robinhood tokenized AMC stock against the CEO’s wishes — Pump Fun proudly promoted 93 asset pairs, including digital assets supposedly linked to publicly-traded US companies like Boeing, Costco, and Trump Media.
Pump Fun’s former App Store listing now serves an error message, “This app is currently not available in your country or region.”
The Solana app for creating and trading memecoins has booked more than $1 billion in revenue.
Pump Fun app ‘temporarily unavailable to download’
The only statement on the removal from the company came from a worker on its mobile app team who posted, “The Pump Fun Mobile App is temporarily unavailable to download from the US & India iOS App Stores.
“For everyone that already has the app installed, everything is operating as usual, and your funds are safe.”
The word “temporarily” bears heroic weight in that claim. Apple hasn’t commented on the delisting, which might be permanent.
For now, Pump Fun can only redirect US and Indian users to its website, or its Google Play app, where the Android version remains available with more than 500,000 downloads.
Canada’s listing is still live, with a publisher listed as Maius Imperium Limited of Limerick, Ireland.
Backpack Securities and Backed Finance’s xStocks help create so-called stock tokens available on Pump Fun. Asset pairs can quote in denominations of stocks, gold, or even wrapped BTC.
One day after Pump Fun started quoting these tokenized equities, Apple georestricted its app.
In 2023, Wallet of Satoshi removed itself from US app stores. Apple threatened to remove Damus over crypto tipping that same year.
The following year, Apple pulled at least nine crypto exchange apps, including Binance and Kraken, from its App Store in India. The cause was anti-money-laundering failures.
Read more: Pump Fun and Kraken delete Hunter Biden $LAPTOP promotion
Past legal issues
In December 2024, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority warned that Pump Fun operates without authorization. Pump Fun blocked UK users within a week, and has kept them out ever since.
Ten days ago, a New York federal judge allowed RICO claims against Pump Fun’s parent company Baton Corporation and founders Alon Cohen, Dylan Kerler, and Noah Tweedale to proceed in litigation while dismissing securities-related claims against the company.
Plaintiffs in that case peg retail losses as high as $5.5 billion.
No court has adjudicated the evidence of this lawsuit, which are still unproven allegations.
Whether any of those legal issues factored into Apple’s decision to georestrict Pump Fun is unknown as of writing time.
PUMP, the platform’s proprietary token, slid about 12% over the 24 hours to Thursday evening. It now trades below the $0.004 debut price of last year’s Initial Coin Offering, a sale that raised about $1.3 billion across public and private rounds.
The token is also languishing 58% below its all-time high.
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