I maintain a self-hosted project and received an email yesterday for a sponsorship like many other companies have done. However, this one was different: https://imgur.com/a/OKGMWFx They started off with a simple and flattering email of what my project does (probably AI description) and that they have shared it with their team and offered to sponsor me like many other companies have done in the past. They say that the sponsorship will come through "Pump.fun's GitHub Sponsorship integration" however that integration does not exist. Here is what is actually being proposed. They launch a memecoin on pump.fun using your project name as the ticker. Every trade on that token pays a fee of ~1%. The token creator receives a share of those fees. Thats the money for the sponsor, its not them writing you a check or a wire transfer. A five figure payout means something around a million dollars in trading volume moved through a token with your projects name on it. The token makes nothing and has no claim on anything whatsoever. Whatever money came out of it came from people who bought it and most pump.fun tokens end up near zero. Your sponsorship is literally a cut of peoples loses. I then proceeded to tell them no and they told me I would get 100% of the fees however that was not my concern. Whether I get 1% or 100% of peoples loses that does not change the fact that I don't want it. They also mentioned they would generate trading activity themselves to make it a more attractive token for people to lose their money on. The challenging part of this is that the money is real: https://thoughts.greyh.at/posts/pumpfun/ . Checkout this post. He received around $11,000 within a day and confirmed that they literally do pay out. However, he also said that afterwards there were no PR's, no issues, no activity, and no one wanting to test his app. His conclusion was that the whole thing was for traders rather than anyone who wanted to support open source. He also said that he probably wont do it again. The token only draws volume because your project is real and your name is attached to it. Thats the entire product. The token, the wallet, and the fees that are given to you are permanently public and are attributed to you. So when the coin collapses, the people holding it see a coin named after your project and the maintainer who took a cut of peoples loses. After that, they move to the next repo. My suggestion is that if you get one of these, you do not have to be rude about it, but just say that you don't consent. Know that nothing stops someone from launching it anyway so be warned about that and if you do see it happen, consider letting your community know. I'm not trying to claim fraud and I'm not going to deliberately name the person who emailed me (they likely change their name every email since their PFP is clearly AI generated and its a gmail account).   submitted by   /u/VizeKarma [link]   [comments]