He Built Memecoin Factory Pump.Fun. Did He Make a Small Fortune Dumping His Own Shitcoins as a Teen?

Pump.Fun, the world’s largest memecoin factory, has made it possible for anybody to create their own cryptocurrency. But years before the platform launched, an individual going by the same name as one of its cofounders, Dylan Kerler, was already making a small fortune hawking—then dumping—home-baked coins.

A WIRED investigation identified eight coins launched by an individual using the name Dylan Kerler in 2017. At that point, the Dylan Kerler who cofounded Pump.Fun was 16 years old. Two of the coins—eBitcoinCash and EthereumCash—gained traction on a crypto forum before tumbling in price, leading investors to allege that the developer had performed a rug pull, an ethically dubious maneuver whereby somebody hypes up their coin and then sinks the price by selling off their holdings.

Through sales of eBitcoinCash and EthereumCash, the developer going by Dylan Kerler earned as much as $75,000 worth of cryptocurrency at 2017 prices, an analysis conducted by crypto security firm CertiK indicates. (Today, that same pile of crypto would be worth around $400,000.)

“After waiting for the market share and price to rise, they quickly cashed out and exited,” says Tielei Wang, chief security scientist at CertiK. “We strongly suspect that [EthereumCash] was used by the developer for a rug pull.”

Pump.Fun’s raison d'être is to protect investors from unscrupulous actors by standardizing the way coins are issued, its cofounders have said. But evidence suggests that the individual going by Dylan Kerler previously indulged in the very rug-pulling activities the platform is supposed to prevent.

Pump.Fun and Dylan Kerler did not respond to several requests for comment.

Pump.Fun was created in January 2024 by three entrepreneurs in their early twenties: Noah Tweedale, Alon Cohen, and Dylan Kerler. The platform has since become the go-to venue for launching and trading memecoins, a highly volatile type of crypto coin typically created for the sole purpose of financial speculation. In only 15 months, Pump.Fun has raked in over $600 million in revenue as a 1 percent cut of trades, third-party calculations show.

The three cofounders have each tried to reveal as little as possible about their identities, whereabouts, and the operation’s corporate structure. That secrecy stems partly from a concern about “personal security and safety,” Tweedale told WIRED in an interview last year, acting as a shield against any would-be extortionists attracted by the crypto wealth passing through Pump.Fun coffers.

Of the trio, perhaps the least is known about Kerler, who has barely any public association with Pump.Fun beyond documentation filed with Companies House, the UK companies register, where he is listed as a director. His role is to lead the team of developers who code the platform and develop new features, Tweedale told WIRED. Aside from an X account under the alias @outdoteth, Kerler has barely any online footprint.

However, digital breadcrumbs deposited across GitHub, YouTube, LinkedIn, Medium, and other corners of the web tie the name to the alleged eBitcoinCash and EthereumCash rug pulls.

In 2017, both coins were first marketed on crypto forum BitcoinTalk by two accounts belonging to the same individual: DOMAINBROKER and ninjagod. After the former account was allegedly “hacked,” its owner began to use the ninjagod profile to communicate with investors instead, according to a forum message.

In a BitcoinTalk thread promoting eBitcoinCash, DOMAINBROKER provided an email address that contains Dylan Kerler’s name, describing it as their “personal email.” In a separate thread for EthereumCash, started by ninjagod, other forum users referred to “Dylan Kerler” as the coin’s developer.

Meanwhile, several indicators place Dylan Kerler, the Pump.Fun cofounder, in the same geographical location as the eBitcoinCash and EthereumCash developer, who in an old Telegram group stated that they were based in Brighton, England.

Electoral records reviewed by WIRED indicate that Kerler was registered to vote at a property in Brighton and Hove, England, as recently as 2024. When WIRED visited the property on April 15, an individual speaking over the intercom declined to answer questions or identify themselves but said that Kerler “doesn’t live here anymore,” thereby confirming the accuracy of the electoral records.

Corporate filings show that a Pump.Fun entity was previously registered to the same Brighton and Hove property. The address is shared with two other companies, both of which list 62-year-old Kee Fatt Phoon as a director. Phoon is registered to vote at that address as well.

Occasionally, Dylan Kerler seems to have also gone by Dylan Phoon, an alternative moniker that appears to be derived from the surname of Kee Fatt Phoon, implying the two are related. Until recently, an account on development platform GitHub that uses Kerler’s outdoteth alias contained an old code repository that included a contact Gmail address for Dylan Phoon. The profile picture for the Gmail account is used across a Medium profile with the username DylanKerler1, as well as LinkedIn and YouTube accounts under Dylan Phoon.

The listings for the YouTube account contain a video about a cryptocurrency called Skycoin. Though Skycoin was launched by somebody else entirely, the project’s emblem is featured on the ninjagod BitcoinTalk account—a loose indicator that the accounts are owned by the same person.

A second YouTube account, @dylankerler4130, features a video about a coin called Equis, marketed as a project that was “REVOLUTIONISING GAMBLING.” Equis was also promoted by ninjagod on BitcoinTalk and is made up of identical code to both eBitcoinCash and EthereumCash. (Equis failed to gain any traction among prospective investors on BitcoinTalk.)

In this way, both of the names used by the Pump.Fun cofounder—Dylan Kerler and Dylan Phoon—are tied back to the BitcoinTalk accounts through which EthereumCash and eBitcoinCash were promoted.

eBitcoinCash and Ethereum Cash were launched by the developer operating under the name Dylan Kerler at the height of the ICO boom, during which hundreds of coins raised billions of dollars from investors. An ICO, or initial coin offering, is a type of fundraising mechanism that became popular among crypto startups in part because it did not involve giving away equity.

Performing an ICO generally involves deploying code to mint a coin on the Ethereum network, outlining the ambitions for a project on a website, and soliciting investment. “Many projects were little more than a white paper and a landing page with a countdown timer—the barrier to entry was minimal,” says Wang.

Though a handful of crypto projects that raised funds by ICO remain in operation—including Ethereum itself—the boom was largely characterized by grift and chicanery, analysts say, before financial regulators eventually cracked down on the practice. Frequently, developers misrepresented the utility and capabilities of their projects, manipulated the price of coins to generate hype, and wildly overstated the profits available to investors, analysts claim.

Developers “were trying to really push the idea of getting crazy returns,” says Nicolai Søndergaard, research analyst at blockchain analytics company Nansen, adding, “That’s where the FOMO really comes in.”

The clamor around ICOs led credulous investors to conduct little due diligence in their eagerness to profit, in a similar way to traders who today race into dubious memecoins. “There are a lot of parallels between the meme frenzy and ICOs,” says Søndergaard. “It’s quite easy to sell an idea for the masses, then rug it.”

The developer going by the name Dylan Kerler began to promote EthereumCash, their most popular coin, in early October 2017.

The developer followed largely the same playbook as their previous launches: They minted the coin on Ethereum, created a website, and marketed on BitcoinTalk, Twitter, and Telegram. To create a swell of enthusiasm, they handed out bundles of the coin for free in what’s called an airdrop. Then they promised to publish a white paper, which at that time was considered a signal of legitimacy likely to propel the price upward.

“You want to push a white paper. That’s what gets people interested,” says Søndergaard. “Sometimes, just the promise of a white paper was enough.”

Screenshots of the now-deleted website posted on Telegram reveal how the coin was presented to prospective investors. “We aim to make the transition from fiat currency to cryptocurrency as easily as possible whilst still maintaining an heir [sic] of integrity an [sic] sophistication,” the website stated. Underneath, the page featured an image of a bank card that would purportedly allow holders to spend EthereumCash in stores.

Within a few days, hundreds of people signed up for the EthereumCash airdrop, a spreadsheet obtained by WIRED shows. Meanwhile, the BitcoinTalk thread was abuzz with conversation. “Let [sic] spread the word and get people to notice this great token,” wrote one forum user. By October 19, EthereumCash had risen in value to around $1.3 million.

However, as early investors celebrated, behind the scenes the developer going by Dylan Kerler was beginning to sell.

In the days after creating EthereumCash, the developer delivered millions of units to a variety of crypto wallets under their control. One of those crypto wallets, whose alphanumeric identifier begins in 0x7f3E2, was then used to sell large quantities into the market, a CertiK analysis shows.

Between October 19 and 21, 0x7f3E2 sold hundreds of batches of EthereumCash on EtherDelta, a peer-to-peer exchange. The sales coincided with a catastrophic fall in the price of the asset, which sank by 87.9 percent.

On Telegram and BitcoinTalk, panic began to spread. One user, presumably trying to find the funny side, took to calling the coin “ECRASH.” Others alleged that the developer was responsible. “Folks were pissed,” another Telegram user, who participated in the EthereumCash airdrop, recounted to WIRED. “I think it may have been my first rug pull.”

The much-anticipated white paper never materialized, and ultimately the developer going by Dylan Kerler disappeared from the BitcoinTalk thread and Telegram group. Only days earlier, they had promised investors that big things were to come: “I can assure you that the project is making headlong progress,” they wrote.

In three transactions across October 20 and 21, the wallet belonging to the developer withdrew proceeds from EtherDelta totalling 240 ETH, the cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network, back then worth around $75,000. After each withdrawal, the ETH was immediately swept into another wallet—0xc8ae1—then further divided between three more: 0x7EAbb, 0x31728, and 0x952F3. From there, the ETH was sent to accounts with Binance, Bity, and the now-defunct Cryptopia, centralized exchanges typically used to convert crypto into regular currency.

In all, WIRED identified at least 20 wallets used by the developer going by Dylan Kerler to either issue, airdrop, or sell eBitcoinCash and EthereumCash—or to move the revenue through a centralized exchange.

The effect of this layering process is to obfuscate the movement of funds, says Søndergaard. “If you have nothing to hide, there’s not a huge reason” for it. “It is suspicious.”

Though some investors continued to hope that Dylan Kerler would return—“I can smell the white paper," joked one person on October 24, days after the price had collapsed—the eventual outcome would have been easily predicted by anybody paying close enough attention.

“It is going to be like a pump and dump where early investors make their money back,” the developer going by Dylan Kerler had written in the BitcoinTalk thread for eBitcoinCash in early October, in a startling display of candor. “Sorry for being brutally honest but it's the truth.”

In the present day, the madcap rise of Pump.Fun continues; the platform is generating revenue at a rate of roughly $1 million a day, according to third-party calculations. As the founders’ crypto fortune swells—dwarfing the revenue from eBitcoinCash and EthereumCash many times over—rug pulls continue on the platform practically unchecked.

“Holy fuck! Holy fuck!” shouted one teenager last November, livestreaming on Pump.Fun as he dumped a coin he had created minutes earlier, netting himself $30,000. Then he flipped two middle fingers to the screen.