Contract: 4fSxCKc91ELQYVdv3tmHW8R15KoALPwEngyoQe1Xpump
Overview
Nitter ($NITTER) is a Solana token launched on Pump.fun on 25 August 2026, hours after X Corp forced the open-source Nitter project offline. It is a news token: the coin has no connection to the software beyond the headline, but a line in the project's own GitHub page turned it into one of the week's most talked-about launches.
What Nitter was
Nitter was a free, open-source way to read X without an account, ads, or JavaScript. It was built by the developer known as zedeus and ran from 2019 onwards. Privacy-minded users, researchers and scrapers relied on it. X repeatedly broke it by tightening access to its unofficial API, and the main site went dark for around a year and a half before being revived in February 2025.
The shutdown
On 24 August 2026, X Corp sent cease-and-desist letters to Nitter and to mirror instances such as XCancel, accusing them of circumventing its API, scraping data, and using account session tokens. The letters cited the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act and the Lanham Act, with a deadline of 5pm ET on 25 August.
Nitter complied. The site posted a notice and went offline, zedeus said development had stopped and that he was seeking legal advice, and the GitHub repository was archived read-only on 25 August. TechCrunch, The Verge and Forbes all covered it.
Two different "devs"
This is the part most people get wrong, so it is worth separating clearly:
- The Nitter developer is zedeus, who built the software and shut it down. There is no confirmation that he deployed a token.
- The token deployer is the wallet
JDQKDrc1TQgBRvdFh56tkta5sYcDj1SoP52Eiu64rSrT, which minted this coin on Pump.fun to ride the news. Explorers showed the developer holding 0% of supply, the usual sign that a deployer has already exited their position.
Pump.fun creator fees accrue automatically into a vault on every trade, roughly 0.30% of volume at this size, but claiming them requires a separate transaction. With hundreds of thousands of dollars in volume there is real fee money involved, but no verified claim transaction has been pointed to. "The dev claimed fees" should not be treated as proven.
The GitHub line
The reason this token outran the dozens of generic "X sued Nitter" copycats is the project's own README. After the cease-and-desist, the repository's donations section was updated and the raw file listed:
$Nitter: 4fSxCKc91ELQYVdv3tmHW8R15KoALPwEngyoQe1Xpump
alongside the existing Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, Solana and Zcash donation addresses.
Crypto Twitter read that as an endorsement from zedeus himself. That is a bigger claim than the evidence supports. A contract address in a README is not the same as deploying the token, signing Pump.fun transactions, or collecting fees. It could be a donation ticker added during the shutdown, or a final commit made before the repository was archived that traders then ran with. Either reading explains the second leg of the chart.
Market activity
The coin first ran on the cease-and-desist headline itself, with Dexscreener listing it under the "Nitter sued by X" blurb. A second leg followed once traders noticed the contract address in the official README, with screenshots of the GitHub page and 7x to 26x profit cards circulating on Twitter and Telegram. It traded in the tens to low hundreds of thousands of dollars in market capitalisation on heavy volume, with the deployer wallet showing no remaining supply.
Timeline
- 2019 to 2023 — zedeus builds and maintains Nitter as the default no-login way to read X.
- 2024 — X tightens its unofficial API; nitter.net goes dark for roughly 18 months.
- February 2025 — the site is revived.
- 24 August 2026 — X Corp issues cease-and-desist letters with a 25 August deadline.
- 25 August 2026 — Nitter goes offline, the repository is archived, and Pump.fun deployers race the headline. This contract is minted.
- 25 to 26 August 2026 — the coin runs on the news, then again once the README contract address is spotted.
Why it matters
Nitter is a clean example of a headline token where the strongest-looking piece of evidence, an address published on an official project page, is also the least verified. The distinction between a developer being associated with a token and a developer launching one is the whole trade, and almost nobody checked which of the two had actually happened.
