Unlucky Trader Accidentally Burns $58K in Pump.fun Solana Token—But He’s Not Angry

A blockchain researcher accidentally burned approximately $58,000 worth of Pump.fun’s PUMP token on Solana—but he told Decrypt that he isn’t “sad or angry” about the costly mistake.

The mistake came after he bought $40,000 worth of the token in Pump.fun’s sought-after token sale on Saturday, which sold out in just 12 minutes. Once the token launched, PUMP debuted at a price of $0.005827, which is 45% higher than its ICO valuation, bringing the unlucky trader’s losses to a total of $58,270.

On Sunday, Chang Min Yu was clearing out his wallet of spam tokens via the Axiom Exchange burn feature. In doing this, he clicked on his PUMP tokens, thinking they were fake, and torched them. “Burning” crypto tokens permanently removes them from circulation by sending them to a blockchain address that cannot be accessed, which means they cannot be recovered.

Min Yu did not realize his mistake, going about his day for several hours before reading a tweet about someone who burned their PUMP allocation—and soon realizing it was him.

“I thought, ‘This guy is so stupid and miserable.’ But I found the wallet address in the picture very familiar, and then I immediately realized: Fuck, that’s me!” Min Yu told Decrypt. “I immediately laughed and shared it with my girlfriend and [my friends].”

He told Decrypt that despite losing $58,270 worth of crypto, he isn’t “sad or angry,” because he likes to focus on things that he can control.

“Since it had already happened and could not be undone, there was nothing to worry about,” Min Yu said with a laugh. “Here’s one of my life rules: Focus on what you can control,” he added in a social post.

Such an outlook shocked his partner and friends, who he says were more upset by the ordeal than him. 

Min Yu is a blockchain researcher at Taiwan-based SuDo Research—and an “on-chain degen” when off the clock, he said. He confirmed that he controls the wallet that made the mistake via a handshake transaction with Decrypt.

Despite participating in the Pump.fun token sale, Min Yu claims to be “bearish” on the token’s long-term price performance. As a result, his plan was to short the token at the range of $0.005 to $0.007 while holding the $40,000 worth of PUMP that he bought at $0.004 during the token sale—thus hedging his bets.

Other unlucky traders appear to have burned their PUMP tokens too, although whether it was intentional or not appears unclear. One trader, for example (according to SolScan), burned $1,627 worth of PUMP on Saturday, while another wallet burned a batch of spam tokens with $837 worth of PUMP accidentally slipping in there.

Min Yu joked that he might’ve missed the opportunity to capitalize on the opportunity—and potentially recoup his losses—by issuing his own Pump-themed meme coin.

“If I could go back to that time, a better approach might be to immediately issue a token like ‘Fuck Pump,’” Min Yu sarcastically finished, “so that people would think I did this on purpose to rebel against Pump.fun, and maybe I could make the money back directly with this trick.”

“Just kidding,” he added.