What is PumaPay (PMA) Crypto Coin? The Full Story Behind the Failed DeFi Payment Protocol

PumaPay (PMA) was never meant to be just another cryptocurrency. Launched in May 2018 by a team based in Cyprus, it was built to solve a real problem: how to let merchants automatically collect recurring payments from customers using crypto. Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, which are stores of value or platforms for smart contracts, PumaPay was designed as a payment protocol - one that flipped the script on how crypto transactions work.

Most crypto payment systems work like this: you, the customer, send money to a merchant. You click "Pay," confirm the transaction, and the funds move. PumaPay flipped that. It introduced something called the PullPayment Protocol. Instead of you pushing funds, the merchant pulls them - automatically, securely, and only when the terms allow it. Think of it like a direct debit, but on blockchain.

This wasn’t theoretical. The system used smart contracts on Ethereum to create what’s called a PullContract. Each contract defined the rules: how much could be pulled, how often, and under what conditions. A gym could set up a weekly $10 pull from a member’s wallet. A streaming service could charge $15 monthly. No need for the customer to log in every time. No chargebacks. No manual invoicing. Just code doing the work.

The token behind it, PMA, was an ERC20 token - meaning it lived on the Ethereum network. It wasn’t a currency you mined or staked for rewards. It was the fuel for the system. Every pull, every contract update, every settlement happened using PMA. The idea was simple: if you wanted to use PumaPay as a merchant, you needed PMA to pay for transaction fees and access the platform’s tools.

That’s where the vision got ambitious. PumaPay targeted industries that traditional payment processors refused to touch - adult entertainment, online gaming, VPNs, crypto exchanges. These are high-risk sectors where banks and credit card companies shut them down over chargeback fears. PumaPay claimed to offer them a free, permissionless alternative. No underwriting. No lengthy applications. Just plug in the SDK, set up your billing rules, and start pulling payments.

They even built a full ecosystem: a business console for merchants, a mobile wallet for users, and a fiat settlement layer to convert crypto into dollars or euros automatically. For a startup in 2018, that was impressive. But here’s the problem: no one used it.

By 2025, PMA’s price had collapsed to around $0.000002. That’s 99.9% below its all-time high of $0.00164 in 2018. Year-over-year, it’s lost 78% against the US dollar and over 87% against Bitcoin. Trading volume? Barely noticeable. On most exchanges, you can’t even find a reliable order book. The market has moved on.

Why did it fail? Three big reasons.

• Too complex for users: Asking customers to approve recurring pulls from their wallets felt invasive. Most people don’t understand smart contracts. They don’t want to give merchants ongoing access to their crypto. It’s like handing out a blank check - even if it’s automated, the trust barrier is huge.
• No merchant adoption: Even in high-risk industries, most businesses stick with established processors like BitPay or Crypto.com Pay. They’re simple, reliable, and come with customer support. PumaPay offered no case studies, no testimonials, no integration guides. Just a whitepaper and a GitHub repo.
• Competition moved faster: While PumaPay was stuck in development, companies like Stripe and PayPal added crypto payouts. Coinbase Commerce simplified recurring payments. Even Solana and Polygon built better infrastructure for on-chain billing. PumaPay’s innovation became irrelevant.

The team behind it - Yoav Dror (CEO), Aristos Christofides (CTO), and others - disappeared from public view after 2020. No roadmap updates. No new features. No announcements. The website still exists, but it’s a ghost. The GitHub repository hasn’t had a commit since 2021. The PullPayment Protocol? Still technically possible. But no one’s building on it.

Today, PMA is a relic. It’s listed on a handful of small exchanges, mostly in Asia and Eastern Europe. The only people still holding it are speculators hoping for a miracle pump - or people who bought it years ago and forgot to sell. There’s no active community. No Discord with thousands of members. No Reddit threads debating its future. Just silence.

Security-wise, if you still hold PMA, treat it like any other ERC20 token. Use a hardware wallet. Never share your private key. Enable two-factor authentication on your wallet app. But don’t expect any support from PumaPay - there’s no helpdesk, no live chat, no email response. The protocol is dead. The token is just a number on a blockchain.

So what’s the lesson here? Innovation doesn’t guarantee success. A clever idea - even one that solves a real problem - means nothing without adoption. PumaPay had the tech. It had the team. It had the timing. But it didn’t have the users. And in crypto, users are everything.

If you’re looking for a crypto payment solution today, look elsewhere. Try BitPay for simplicity. Use Coinbase Commerce if you want integration with major platforms. Or explore newer protocols like Circle’s USDC with automated recurring payments. They’re alive, supported, and growing. PumaPay? It’s a footnote in crypto history - a bold experiment that never left the lab.