The website where crypto promoters pay people to tattoo ads on themselves

By T.M. Brown, CNN

(CNN) — On June 6, a man with a slightly receding hairline walked into a beachside tattoo stand in Chennai, India, showed the proprietor a message on a phone screen, and, with video recording the whole process, settled in to get a line of text apparently tattooed across his forehead.

The man, reportedly named Arivu, was following instructions that a 21-year-old in Florida named Ayush had posted to a cryptocurrency trading website called Pump.fun. In return for getting the facial tattoo, Ayush had offered to pay Arivu in cryptocurrency valued at around $3,000. (He declined to give his last name, citing privacy concerns.)

Pump.fun is a platform that specializes in facilitating the creation and exchange of otherwise worthless “memecoins.” The memecoin economy is inherently driven by efforts to grab attention — to “pump” a coin through a cycle of money chasing interest or notoriety around it — and last week, Pump.fun announced a new feature called Pump.fun GO, in which users could offer public bounties, payable in crypto, for people who complete various tasks.

“Pay ANYONE to do ANYTHING. Create & complete bounties for ANY task and leverage the power of humans & money across the globe,” the company wrote on X.

In this case, leveraging the power of money seemed to mean convincing someone in a region where many laborers make less than $10 per day to permanently disfigure his own face. “I was just shocked, but at the same time that $3,000 is him working for 5 years,” Ayush said in a direct message on X.

Jordan, a 27-year-old artist in Toronto, yielded to the offer of quick money and got a tattoo promoting a cryptocurrency casino on his leg last week. (Jordan is a pseudonym; he requested anonymity to avoid backlash from the crypto community.) “I’m struggling financially and my girlfriend is a tattoo artist, so it was a little easier for me,” he said. The bounty paid him about $3,000.

Bounty creators generally require proof, which can include a request to post video evidence to social media websites like X, as Arivu did. The legality of these agreements is murky, and the anonymity of cryptocurrency transactions makes them difficult to regulate.

“Pump.fun has always operated at the controversial edge of the internet’s attention economy,” said Vetle Lunde, head of research at the cryptocurrency analysis firm K33. Lunde said that during the memecoin craze in 2024, Pump.fun’s livestreams “became notorious for incentivizing increasingly extreme behavior, including threats of self-harm, violence, animal abuse, and other shock content, as token creators competed for attention.”

The site ditched the livestreams after significant backlash, saying in a statement that it would “be pausing the live streaming functionality on the site for an indefinite time period until the moderation infrastructure is ready to deal with the heightened levels of activity.” The feature was relaunched last year with improved moderation and a set of livestream policies that prohibit violence, harassment or sexual content.

That the site’s bounty platform quickly turned into an exploitative marketplace was all too predictable, said Nicholas Vrousalis, a philosophy professor at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, who also wrote “Exploitation as Domination,” a book about the power inequities of global capitalism. “The greater the precarity and vulnerability of a given population, the higher the predatory instincts there are towards them,” Vrousalis said.

So far, some of the bounty activities have been seemingly harmless — one user earned a little more than $300 to go to a McDonald’s and be the first to post acceptable proof — or even beneficial: One user posted a bounty of 15 Solana, or about $1,000, to bail someone out of jail. A user posted videos of himself paying a $35 bail for a 70-year-old homeless man named Dickie Schultz in Lincoln, Nebraska, as well as giving him a ride to a homeless shelter and some cash and food.

Other rewards have taken a more dystopian turn. According to the cryptocurrency news website BeIn Crypto, on the first day the marketplace opened, a user offered 10,000 Solana — about $690,000 at the time — to someone who would film their suicide. The listing has now vanished.

Alon Cohen, one of the co-founders of Pump.fun, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Emails and messages on social media to Pump.fun accounts went unanswered. When reached by phone, Stephen D. Palley, Cohen’s lawyer, said “I’m not able to talk” and hung up. According to the platform’s terms of service, it exerts control over which bounties are allowed on the site including “final say” over whether a bounty “is approved, delayed, denied, withheld, reversed, reclaimed, or reallocated, and it may do so for many reasons, including disputes, missing information, suspected fraud, policy violations, technical issues, legal concerns, or safety and security risks.” It also denies any liability or responsibility for “any Bounty Poster’s failure to comply with applicable labor or tax laws, rules, or regulations.”

The tattoo offer led many would-be bounty collectors to post AI-generated images of tattooed foreheads, but Arivu provided footage showing him walking up to the DY Tattoo parlor in Chennai. The person filming zoomed in on Arivu’s phone to show a shot of the bounty details. He was supposed to get the word “bountywork,” the name of a group on social media boosting a cryptocurrency with the same name, inked across his forehead.

There was a catch, though. Ayush, who had promised the reward, had misspelled “bountywork” as “boutywork” in the task description. Arivu followed the directions diligently, getting the misspelled ticker tattooed and posting the results to X. (Arivu’s account has since been suspended, though the video of the process is still available.) But Ayush refused to pay him because the misspelled word wouldn’t promote the memecoin.

The dispute made the rounds in the crypto corners of social media, which led to the creation of yet another cryptocurrency called, yes, “Boutywork.” The new coin was supposedly meant to compensate Arivu, though given the anonymity inherent to crypto transactions, it’s unclear whether he was ever made whole. (Attempts to contact Arivu failed. The tattoo shop owner, Durai Yuva, confirmed in a WhatsApp message that Arivu had gone through with getting inked.)

Ayush said he understands where people criticizing the dynamic between him and Arivu are coming from, but added that the creation of the typo-spiked “boutycoin” “raised 30,000 dollars for him, which is retirement money in India.”

Jordan was conflicted about getting the tattoo in the first place; he felt guilty that he was promoting a casino that was “exploiting people and their addictions.” He said he’s planning on asking his girlfriend to cover up the tattoo in the coming weeks, and that he’s been turned off from the memecoin ecosystem because of its toxic acquisitiveness. “People going through with things like forehead tattoos for money, it’s potentially life ruining,” he said. “It’s like a ‘Black Mirror’ episode.”

Vrousalis said that the claim that Arivu’s individual benefit demonstrates the platform’s positive financial impact involves one of the core philosophical questions in economics. Individuals like Arivu consent to these sorts of humiliations because it benefits them in the immediate term and they have limited options. “Exploitation is actually net-positive, everyone wins. And yet they’re awful, it’s bad for people’s dignity and humanity,” he said.

William Cavanaugh, a theologian and professor of Catholic studies at DePaul University in Chicago, said that this dynamic follows from global economic forces that transform human relationships into something more like marketplace transactions. “This is a clear case where people are being instrumentalized and dehumanized for the sake of personal profit,” he said.

Cavanaugh compares what’s happening to a “commodity fetishism,” whereby people are treated as products without a sense of humanity. He pointed to Pope Leo XIV’s recently published encyclical and its emphasis on the concept of human dignity.

“It is important to ensure that this growth in appreciation of human dignity is not obscured by the pressure of new ideologies or very powerful interests in today’s world,” Leo wrote. “Among these ideologies, I consider particularly insidious the one that suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective.”

As with much in the cryptocurrency space, it’s unclear to what extent most bounties are actually being completed or if the entire phenomenon is simply meant to be talked about, to inflate the value of memecoins. Ayush, for his part, was direct about his goals with setting up multiple bounties. “im pushing this memecoin bountywork, and i made the coin so i get all fees,” he wrote. “im creating cool bounty’s for them to go viral and get more attention on the coin.”

Promotion seems to be the only thing that matters here: Ayush offered to create a “private bounty” in exchange for this article being promoted on CNN’s social media channels. I refused.

“It’s sad that all the rich people left crypto and it’s now the entire industry is just teenagers in America forcing poor people to do shameful things,” Nikita Bier, the head of product at X, wrote under the post of Arivu’s video. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul was more direct in her criticism of the platform, writing on X that she’s “Offering a bounty on the first bill introduced to ban this dystopian nightmare.”

“Any business model that rewards people for targeting, harassing, or endangering others should alarm everyone,” a spokesperson for Hochul said. A source in the governor’s office added that the administration is looking into what potential role state-level legislation could play in restricting their use.

Whether Arivu was forced to get a word inked across his forehead may not matter. The bounties offered through Pump.fun create a gamified system to get people who need money to do things they wouldn’t have done otherwise, with lasting consequences. When asked whether he thought someone would go through with the tattoo bounty, Ayush said, “I was certain someone from a third world country would do it.”

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