Meme release enters the Warring States Period: LaunchLab graduated on a 198 token that forces Pump.fun to make concessions to creators

Author: Azuma (@azuma_eth)

On May 13, on-chain data analyst Adam posted on X on Dune panel data showing that in the past 24 hours, Raydium's token issuance platform LaunchLab (including third-party issuance platforms built on LaunchLab, etc.) has graduated tokens in the past 24 hours, with 198 tokens exceeding Pump.fun.

Adam commented on this that this is the first time in history that Pump.fun has encountered real competition.

Historical grievances

The grudge between Pump.fun and Raydium has been around for a long time.

In the early design of Pump.fun, token issuance must go through two stages: "inside" and "foreign" - after the token issuance, it will first enter the "inside" trading stage, which will rely on the Bonding Curve of the pump.fun protocol itself for matching. When the transaction volume reaches US$69,000, it will enter the "foreign" trading stage. At that time, liquidity will be moved to Raydium, and the pool will be built on the DEX and transactions will continue to be opened.

However, Pump.fun announced the launch of its own AMM DEX product, PumpSwap, on March 21. Since then, when the Pump.fun token enters the "foreign disk", liquidity will no longer be moved to Raydium, but will lead to PumpSwap - this move directly cuts off the diversion path of Pump.fun to Raydium, thereby reducing the latter's transaction volume and fee income.

In response, Raydium announced on April 16 that it has officially launched the token issuance platform LaunchLab, allowing users to issue tokens quickly through the platform and automatically migrate to Raydium AMM after the token liquidity reaches a certain scale (85 SOL). Apparently, this is Raydium’s direct counterattack against the aggressive Pump.fun.

Odaily Note: For details, please refer to "Data Analysis How much does Raydium rely on Pump.fun? 》 and "Raydium counterattack Pump.fun, who can laugh to the end of the meme return season? 》.

LaunchLab's "killing move"

Although LaunchLab is similar to Pump.fun in terms of token issuance functions, its biggest feature is not the issuance process itself. LaunchLab's architecture supports third-party integration, which allows external teams and platforms to create and manage their own startup environments within the LaunchLab ecosystem. In other words, third parties can rely on LaunchLab's underlying technology (the emphasis is on liquidity pools still remain in LaunchLab and Raydium) to launch independent token launch front-ends.

LaunchLab's official interface shows that there are more than ten third-party token issuance platforms built on LaunchLab, including the recently popular Bonk community token issuance platform Letsbonk.Fun. In fact, most of the tokens that graduated from LaunchLab's ecosystem are from Letsbonk.Fun (see "Letsbonk.fun, the new coin issuing new coin, has become popular for the second time, and IKUN has become the latest top player on the platform?").

In short, LaunchLab's strategy is to use third-party platforms such as Letsbonk.Fun to siege Pump.fun with the "pack of wolves" strategy. Judging from the current trend, the strategy has begun to show results.

In addition, Raydium also launched an incentive plan before Pump.fun to provide incentives for issuance and transactions on LaunchLab and related third-party platforms.

According to the latest official disclosure, as of today, Raydium has allocated about $2.8 million (about 950,000 RAYs) of rewards to traders above LaunchLab and Letsbonk.Fun, and the current incentive scale released per day is about $110,000.

Pump.fun was forced to respond

Or feeling the momentum of LaunchLab-type "wolf" coming, Pump.fun was finally forced to spit out some of the cakes in order to attract more users to retain them. Last night, Pump.fun announced that it would launch a "creator income sharing" mechanism, and token creators will receive 50% of the transaction revenue share of the PumpSwap platform. From now on, after any user creates a token, the creator can continue to earn income as long as the token generates transactions. Officials said that the mechanism aims to encourage more high-quality project parties to participate in ecological construction.

At the same time, another small episode happened last night. Pump.fun's X page briefly blocked Letsbonk.Fun founder Tom and some Raydium contributors, but I don't know what happened...

Can the Meme release track usher in a reshuffle?

As shown in the figure below, for most of the time since mid-2024, Pump.fun (green part) has occupied a nearly dominant market position in the issuance of Solana ecological Meme. It was not until recently that emerging issuance platforms such as LaunchLab (purple part) and Boop (blue part) have begun to gradually occupy a certain market share.

For any market, competition is not a bad thing for ordinary users, because more intense competition often forces vested interests to expose more profits and provide a better user experience - such as the recent JD.com battle with Meituan.

From the perspective of ordinary users, perhaps we should look forward to LaunchLab being able to continue to make efforts and see more new players like LaunchLab appear.