In May 2024, pump.fun was hacked, with the attacker stealing approximately $2 million worth of SOL and a large number of meme coins. At the time, the attacker claimed they would airdrop these funds randomly to players on Solana, once dubbed the "Robin Hood of the crypto world."
Jarett Dunn (online alias Stacc), the attacker, is a former pump.fun employee. Last December, he was sentenced to 6 years in prison by a judge in London.
Two days ago, he exposed a large number of Telegram chat records from his time at pump.fun.
So I spent a lot of time going through these chat logs one by one. Honestly, after reading them, I was confused because these records did not contain the kind of intentional malicious content I had imagined, such as the pump.fun team manipulating liquidity or secretly collecting user fees. There was also no content suggesting major personal moral issues with founder alon or other team members.
But in Jarett Dunn's tweet, he called himself a whistleblower and viewed his exposure as a form of "righteous self-destruction." Someone expressed the same doubt in his comments, to which he replied:
"These records show that I told them twice they must complete the KYC/AML process to enable livestreaming on the platform, (but they ignored it) and then we all know how things ended up (referring to the chaotic and unrestrained livestreaming scene on pump.fun in its early days)."
If this accusation has some merit, the next one is a bit more of a leap:
"An employee said something like this in the group: his friend was already looking for models to do porn as soon as pump.fun's livestreaming went live."
The chat record corresponding to this accusation is as follows. First, pump.fun co-founder Sapijiju shared a Twitch streamer in the pump.fun company group, saying another Twitch streamer had launched a token through pump.fun. An employee stated that this streamer was a Rugger (someone who performs a rug pull) and had rugged 5 tokens the day before.
Then this employee said his friend was looking for "models" (to do the same thing). In context, this seems more like a joke. However, Jarett Dunn's suggestion was indeed interspersed, where he took the opportunity to express that partnering with a livestreaming platform would be better, as it would avoid KYC responsibilities and significantly shorten the time needed for pump.fun to launch its livestreaming feature.
The more significant accusation here should be that the entire team, knowing this was a serial Rugger, still maintained a casual, joking attitude. alon, as a co-founder, stated in the records that he "felt like he had seen her profile before," and then nothing more came of it.
Some other records show the early "makeshift" nature of pump.fun. For example, creating a contract they themselves felt was "a piece of shit" just to handle investor pressure (needing to show investors how many employees the company had), while also looking for lawyers to draft a new one. For a then "young" pump.fun, it's hard to call this a black mark:
The most "explosive" part of the records disclosed by Jarett Dunn might be the release of the phone numbers associated with the Telegram accounts of alon and Sapijiju. Since this involves privacy, screenshots of this part will not be included in this article.
So, what kind of deep grudge is this? From the records, I cannot find the beginning of the enmity between Jarett Dunn and pump.fun, but he is a talented programmer who was also diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at the age of 20.
Two years ago, when he attacked pump.fun, his mother had recently passed away. At this time, he had only been with pump.fun for 6 weeks.
Four days after the attack, he was arrested at a hotel located just 90 meters from pump.fun's office in London; he was staying there. After his arrest, he was immediately deemed unfit for questioning by the police and sent to a hospital for a two-week mental health treatment, having been off his medication for months.
At his sentencing hearing two months after pleading guilty, he tried to withdraw his plea, a sudden change that made his legal team quit.
In September 2023, he wrote in a tweet, "I'm homeless, planning to sleep in the park, fighting the bugs I created with 5G."
Yet in the records, pump.fun reimbursed his flight tickets for him to fly from Canada to the UK. Was he happy and fulfilled back then?
Faced with such a complex, life-troubled programmer, I can only sigh at the vicissitudes of life.
