Pump.fun's dominant position shaken for the first time, Raydium's "pack of wolves" strategy pays off
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
Pump.fun's dominant position shaken for the first time, Raydium's "pack of wolves" strategy pays off
Pump.fun token count surpassed by LaunchLab, can the Meme issuance赛道 see a reshuffle?
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Azuma (@azuma_eth)
On May 13, on-chain data analyst Adam shared a Dune dashboard showing that in the past 24 hours, LaunchLab—the token launch platform under Raydium (including third-party platforms built on LaunchLab such as Letsbonk.Fun)—graduated 198 tokens, surpassing Pump.fun's 171 graduated tokens during the same period.
Adam commented that this marks the first time in history that Pump.fun has faced genuine competition.
Historical Rivalry
The rivalry between Pump.fun and Raydium runs deep.
In Pump.fun’s early design, token launches went through two phases—"inner market" and "outer market." After issuance, tokens would first enter the "inner market" trading phase, facilitated by Pump.fun’s own bonding curve. Once trading volume reached $69,000, they would move to the "outer market," where liquidity was migrated to Raydium, enabling pool creation and continued trading on the DEX.
However, on March 21, Pump.fun announced the launch of its self-built AMM DEX product, PumpSwap. From then on, liquidity for tokens entering the "outer market" would no longer migrate to Raydium but instead be directed to PumpSwap—effectively cutting off the traffic flow from Pump.fun to Raydium and reducing the latter’s trading volume and fee revenue.
In response, Raydium officially launched its token launch platform LaunchLab on April 16, allowing users to quickly issue tokens via the platform, with liquidity automatically migrating to Raydium AMM once it reaches a certain scale (85 SOL). Clearly, this is Raydium’s direct counterattack against the rapidly rising Pump.fun.
Odaily note: For more details, see “Data Analysis: How Dependent Is Raydium on Pump.fun?” and “Raydium Strikes Back at Pump.fun: Who Will Prevail in the Meme Comeback Season?”
LaunchLab’s Killer Move
Although LaunchLab offers similar token issuance functionality to Pump.fun, its key advantage lies not in the issuance process itself. LaunchLab’s architecture supports third-party integration, allowing external teams and platforms to create and manage their own launch environments within the LaunchLab ecosystem. In other words, third parties can leverage LaunchLab’s underlying technology (with the critical point being that liquidity pools remain within LaunchLab and Raydium) to launch independent token launch front-ends.
According to LaunchLab’s official interface, there are already over ten third-party token launch platforms built on LaunchLab, including the recently popular Bonk community token launch platform Letsbonk.Fun. In fact, most of the tokens currently graduating from the LaunchLab ecosystem come from Letsbonk.Fun (see “New Token Launch Platform Letsbonk.fun Explodes Again—Has IKUN Become the Platform’s Latest Star?”).
In short, LaunchLab aims to use third-party platforms like Letsbonk.Fun to launch a “pack-of-wolves” strategy against Pump.fun, and current trends suggest this strategy is already showing initial success.
Besides, Raydium launched an incentive program ahead of Pump.fun to reward issuance and trading activities on LaunchLab and related third-party platforms.
According to the latest official disclosure, Raydium has so far distributed approximately $2.8 million (about 950,000 RAY tokens) in rewards to traders on LaunchLab and Letsbonk.Fun, with around $110,000 in incentives released daily.
Pump.fun Forced to Respond
Perhaps feeling the pressure from LaunchLab’s growing “pack-of-wolves,” Pump.fun has finally been forced to give up part of its market share to retain more users. Last night, Pump.fun announced it will introduce a “creator revenue sharing” mechanism, under which token creators will receive 50% of transaction fee revenues generated on the PumpSwap platform. Starting today, any user who creates a token will earn ongoing income whenever trading occurs. The team stated this mechanism aims to incentivize more high-quality projects to participate in ecosystem development.
Meanwhile, another minor incident occurred last night: Pump.fun briefly blocked Tom, founder of Letsbonk.Fun, and some Raydium contributors on its X page, though it remains unclear what exactly happened…
Could the Meme Launch Arena Be Reshuffled?
As shown in the figure below, for most of the period since mid-2024, Pump.fun (green portion) has held a near-dominant market position in Solana’s meme token launches, until recently when emerging launch platforms like LaunchLab (purple portion) and Boop (blue portion) began gradually capturing market share.
For any market, competition is not bad news for ordinary users, as fiercer competition often forces incumbents to redistribute more profits and deliver better user experiences—for example, the recent battle between JD.com and Meituan.
From the perspective of average users, perhaps we should hope to see LaunchLab continue pushing forward and witness even more new players like LaunchLab emerge.
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
Odaily
