A goldfish at gunpoint has become the grim mascot of crypto's most lawless livestreaming platform.
A clip circulating on X this week appears to show a streamer pointing a firearm at a pet fish and refusing to lower it until viewers pumped his memecoin, the latest entry in a genre that has turned animal cruelty into a trading tactic.
The footage revives a stunt first seen on Pump.fun in late 2024, when creators learned that shock value moved markets faster than fundamentals. The reported sum behind the clip remains unconfirmed, yet the machinery rewarding such spectacles is documented and very real.
The fish-at-gunpoint format is not new. In November 2024, traders shared footage of a Pump.fun creator who aimed a gun at a goldfish and promised to spare it only if buyers pushed his token higher, a scene catalogued by Decrypt in its review of the platform'swildest livestreams.
Un tipo se puso en vivo a amenazar con matar a su pescado si su memecoin no llegaba a determinado valor de mercadoTermino ganado 255,000 dolares por toda la gente que se copo a rescatar al bichopic.twitter.com/dSJIo1S2dy
That same period produced a creator threatening to shoot his dog, another taping a dog to a wall, the group behind Chicken Fight Club beheading a chicken on camera, and a wave of copycat tokens chasing the same outrage.
These were not stray provocations. The crypto outlet Protos documented aweekend of chaosin which one streamer fired a pistol indoors each time his coin rose, while a child brandished a shotgun and threatened his family unless his token reached a $60,000 market cap.
NPR's Planet Money later folded the goldfish episode into its ownexaminationof the memecoin economy, noting plainly that somebody had held a gun to a fish. The pattern grew so brazen that Pump.fun briefly stripped out its livestreaming feature altogether, only to reinstate it once the trading volumes that the spectacles generated proved too lucrative to abandon.
The reason such stunts persist comes down to money that genuinely changes hands. Under a fee overhaul branded Project Ascend, Pump.fun began paying token creators a share of every trade, and Decrypt reported that the new model distributed£1.5 million ($2 million) in a single day, up from £147,000 ($198,000) the day before. Creators of tokens valued between $88,000 and $300,000 earn the steepest cut, set at 0.95 per cent of every trade.
Those percentages translate into serious payouts. A livestreaming duo known as Bagwork pocketed around £62,000 ($83,410) in creator fees afterplaying unreleased songsattributed to Drake and Future, while another creator claimed roughly £59,000 ($80,000) in a single haul.
Source: International Business Times UK
