Pump.fun coin image not loading, causes and fixes

Your coin looks fine on Pump.fun and shows a grey square on DexScreener. Or it looked fine at launch and broke an hour later.

Two different problems with two different answers, so start by working out which one you have.

The chain that has to work

Three links, and any one of them failing produces the same grey box.

Mint account. Points to a metadata URI, stored on chain, never changes.

Metadata JSON. Sits at that URI, usually on IPFS or an Arweave gateway, and contains an image field.

Image file. Wherever the JSON points.

Any site loading your coin walks that whole chain in order, so a slow JSON response, an unreachable gateway, or a 404 on the image URL each produce exactly the same placeholder no matter how correct the other two links happen to be.

Case one: broken everywhere

Rarer, and it means something genuinely failed at creation.

Usually the upload didn't complete before the mint transaction went through, so your metadata points at something that was never stored. Occasionally the file was in a format the pipeline rejected.

Can you fix it? On Pump.fun, no. Metadata is set at creation and the update authority is normally revoked as part of the launch, which is a feature for buyers and a problem for you here. Your image is permanent.

Which means the only real answer is prevention: check the preview before confirming the mint, every time. The launch checklist covers the 10 minutes that avoid this entirely.

Case two: fine on one site, broken on another

Far more common, and much less serious.

Each site caches metadata on its own schedule. DexScreener, Birdeye, Solscan, and Pump.fun all fetch independently, so one that happened to fetch during a gateway hiccup keeps serving the placeholder until it refreshes.

Usually resolves itself within a few hours. Some sites offer a refresh or "update token info" option, worth trying once. Requesting it repeatedly speeds nothing up.

Case three: it was fine and then it wasn't

Gateway trouble, almost certainly.

IPFS content lives at a hash, and gateways serve it. If the gateway your metadata points at goes down or rate-limits, the file is still perfectly intact and simply unreachable through that door.

Check by loading the metadata URI directly in a browser. JSON comes back? The chain is fine and the problem is downstream caching. Nothing comes back? The gateway is the issue, and it'll typically recover on its own.

Avoiding it next time

Four things, all cheap:

1. Square image, 500 by 500 pixels or larger. Non-square gets cropped unpredictably across different sites
2. PNG or JPG, under 1 MB. Large files time out on the first fetch, which is the fetch that gets cached
3. Wait for the upload to confirm before submitting the mint transaction
4. Check the preview on the confirmation screen, not after

That third one causes most case-one failures. The interface will happily let you proceed while the upload is still in flight.

Why it matters more than it should

Somebody scrolling a board gives your coin about 3 seconds.

In those seconds they process image, name, ticker, and whether anything is happening. Grey placeholder fails the first one instantly, and the decision gets made before they've read your ticker. How good the concept is stops mattering once nobody gets past the thumbnail.

So the image is one of the highest-value 10 minutes in an entire launch, and one of the most commonly rushed. Launching with no community covers why the page carries so much weight when nobody knows you.

Which case is yours

Broken everywhere means the metadata failed at creation and can't be fixed on Pump.fun, and the coin image guide covers getting it right the first time. Broken on one site means caching, and it resolves. Test the metadata URI in a browser to tell them apart in about 30 seconds, and check the preview before minting so neither happens again.