Raydium and Pump.fun make imitation deals with each other. Will there be a winner after "breakup"?

Author: flowie , ChainCatcher

After Pump.fun "solutely" as AMM, Raydium began to fight back. This morning, according to Blockworks, Raydium launched LaunchLab, a Meme coin launch platform similar to Pump.fun.

Perhaps affected by this news, Raydium token Ray rose by about 30% to $2.07, and fell back to around $1.8 as of press time.

But after the Solana ecological meme fever subsided, Raydium and Pump.fun's breakup was "tighter" and could there be a winner in the end? ********

There may be different intentions between each other

LaunchLab, released by Raydium, is essentially a forked version of Pump.fun, but has been optimized and improved. For example, unlike Pump.fun that only supports SOL as a quotation token, LaunchLab will support a variety of quotation tokens, which provides users with more choices.

And Raydium's Pump.fun's life this time seems to be a forced counterattack, but it may have been a strange intention.

Infra, a core contributor of Raydium, mentioned in an interview with Blockworks that LaunchLab was started “months ago”, but the project has been put on hold because he “didn’t want the team to feel that Raydium is competing directly with them.”

But as Pump.fun's AMM plan surfaces, Raydium may not be installed at all.

Under this meme craze, Pump.fun and Raydium were previously the best "partners".

The Pump.fun token issuance mechanism is divided into "inner disk" and "external disk". When the token trading volume issued by users on Pump.fun reaches US$69,000, it will enter the "foreign trading" trading stage.

Foreign trading mainly relies on Raydium. The deep liquidity pool and stability provided by Raydium can help tokens on Pump.fun to better trade. But Raydium charges 0.25% per transaction, and Pump.fun needs to pay a lot of fees.

As the leading AMM platform of Solana's ecosystem, it is precisely because of the popularity of meme and Pump.fun that it can be said that it has made a lot of money in the past year.

The "2024 Memecoin Annual Consumption Report" shows that in 2024, Solana Ecological Meme Coin transactions have incurred at least US$3.093 billion in handling fees. Among them, Raydium may earn more than $1 billion, while Pump.fun only earned $240 million.

But last month, Raydium's lying profit model was broken after Pump.fun launched its own AMM and tried to get rid of Raydium's dependence. Affected by the following news, Raydium's token, Ray token fell by more than 20% on the same day.

The purpose of Pump.fun's self-built AMM is also obvious. I want to put the money I give to Raydium in my pocket. In addition, after building my own AMM, Pump.fun can fully control the rules and fee allocation of liquidity pools, which may have stronger control over users.

As the biggest beneficiary of Pump.fun, Pump.fun's solo flight does have a huge impact on Raydium's revenue.

According to Blockworks Research, Pump.fun's Meme coins accounted for 41% of Raydium transaction fee revenue in the past 30 days.

Fortunately, Raydium did make money. After experiencing a sharp decline and the solo threat of Pump.fun, according to Blockworks Research, Raydium still has about $168 million in funds on its balance sheet, which can support it to try to make a new meme launch platform.

Brother and brother, can there be a winner after the breakup?

The Solana ecological meme fever has receded recently, and the market attention has temporarily shifted to Binance's BSC chain.

Both Raydium and Pump.fun have fallen sharply from their highs.

According to DeFillam data, Raydium's TVL has fallen by about 60% to $1.1 billion from its high of $2.7 billion at the end of January, and daily transaction fees have fallen by more than 90% to around $800,000 from its high of $10 million at the end of January; and the token price has also fallen by more than 75% to around $1.8 from its high of $7.6.

Pump.fun's transaction fees also fell more than 95% from its high of $15 million to $800,000. Yesterday, according to Lookonchain monitoring, only one token on Pump.fun had a market value of more than $1 million in 24 hours.

Perhaps it is precisely because of the sharp drop in income and it is difficult to make money. Pump.fun and Raydium do not want to make money for each other.

But after making imitations between each other, can Pump.fun and Raydium have a winner?

The current reality is that the overall market is declining, the market was originally a little weak under long-term PVP, and the attention of Solana Ecological Meme has also shifted to the BSC chain. The demand is gone, and it seems difficult to do miracles with Pump.fun and Raydium.

On the other hand, is the other party's business so easy to do? After Pump.fun built his own AMM, it was also questioned by Raydium. Infra, the core contributor of Raydium, posted on the X platform that it was a "strategic misjudgment" that Pump.fun's complete abandonment of Raydium was a "strategic misjudgment."

Infra believes that Pump.fun underestimates the value of Raydium's liquidity support, which has gained a dominance in Solana, questioning whether users have enough motivation to migrate to Pump.fun's new AMM. .

But for Raydium, Pump.fun has established a strong user base and brand awareness in the Solana ecosystem, and has established user stickiness in experiences such as "fool-style" operations and social interaction. It is not easy to make Raydium more attractive in a short period of time. And Pump.fun has been criticized for a large number of junk tokens that cannot graduate. Raydium's LaunchLab will also face similar doubts if it uses a token creation mechanism similar to a low threshold.

Judging from the reactions of Twitter users, after the attention shift, Pump.fun and Raydium may not have attracted much attention, and it is difficult to make a conclusion on which one wins and who loses.

Users such as crypto kOL Jeremy and SonicSVM BD head Arif Kazi believe that no matter the competition between the two companies, users are winners because it may lead to lower fees or better innovation.