The Rise of Crypto Launchpads: How Pumpfun Dominates the Market and New Players Emerge

Over the past few weeks, new projects that are coming into the crypto market have been using launchpads more and more.

In the past few weeks, new projects launching on the crypto market have been using launchpads more and more.

These platforms, which allow teams to create and distribute their own tokens, have been gaining more and more momentum in recent weeks. They come up nearly every day and keep being brought up in the latest funding round and even E3 blockchain gaming.

While Pumpfun has kept its position as the leader in the launchpad category, enabling upward of 200,000 token launches per week, a striking figure that shows the platform’s ability to flawlessly drive new projects to market. The triumph and activity level of Pumpfun have set a high standard for any other platforms looking to persist in or enter this part of the market. Over the past year, the platform has flawlessly maintained itself at the top, with an upward graduation rate that appears to be hitting close to 2%—the kind of number you’d like to hear for a platform that does what Pumpfun does.

However, even with Pumpfun’s continuous success, there has been a marked drop in the overall creation of new tokens. Since January, the creation of tokens has decreased by about 50%, with the creation of new tokens seen in previous months perhaps peaking off. But this decrease in token creation is balanced by a resurgence in the creation of tokens that is now underway. Since the summer of 2024, the creation of tokens has more than doubled, signaling that creating new tokens is more likely now than in 2023. This upturn in token creation can be partly attributed to the number of teams and developers who are now seeking opportunities on the platform, in turn rendering it more competitive.

1/ Launchpads have been a hot topic in recent weeks with many new projects launching on the market.@Pumpdotfun's success and dominance of the category over the past year serves as motivation for other teams to compete for a slice of the pie.

So what's happening with launchpads?🧵

— Blockworks Research (@blockworksres) May 5, 2025

Emerging Competitors: Raydium, Moonshot, and New Entrants

Now, Pumpfun is on top, but other platforms aren’t lagging behind. Take LaunchLab, for example. This is a launchpad created by the folks at Raydium, and for how new it is, it already has quite a few recent projects to its name. One of these was the launch of a Bonk token, which—rightly or wrongly—has managed to grab the attention of a larger segment of the crypto market. No sign here of bank token launches subsiding, and where this is headed may not be pretty.

Moreover, JupiterExchange has taken an interest in Moonshot, which is also in the business of running its own launchpad. But whereas Moonshot has undertaken an almost negligible number of launches—just a few thousand tokens per week—it hasn’t managed to carve out a large business for itself. It seems that Moonshot’s struggle to find launchpad momentum against a backdrop where Pumpfun is the 800-pound gorilla of the space shows just how difficult it is for any new platform to render itself interesting in a now here-today, gone-tomorrow world.

Another platform, Boopdotfun, has entered the scene with a unique approach to incentivizing adoption and is offering creators token airdrops to access its large allocations of tokens. However, to access these tokens, creators must do two things: 1) launch a token (I’ll explain this step later) and 2) hit a certain market cap. Despite the innovative model, Boopdotfun’s activity levels have started to decline.

Launchpads on Base and the Future of Token Launches

Base, the layer-2 network from Coinbase, has also seen a burgeoning set of launchpad products, with a plethora of teams exploring novel tokenomics. Platforms like ClankeronBase are moving toward automating the creation and trading of tokens, while social-graph-oriented projects like Zora are immersing themselves in this new world, too. But despite all this activity, token-launch volume on Base is lagging at a level that looks a lot like the calm before a storm, with only dozens to maybe a few hundred tokens being launched each day.

It is interesting that, even though launchpads are the favored method for new token creation, most of the trading volume being generated within Base from meme coins is still coming from tokens that are not affiliated with any launchpad. Memecoins, which are usually launched in a more informal and decentralized manner, still take the lead in terms of trading volume on the Base network. There is an important distinction here: the launchpad route seems to be preferred for more structured projects, while those who are choosing the less serious route have no trouble generating meme coin trading volume.

At the same time, Pumpfun does not just influence the launches of new tokens