Raydium Fights Back at Pump.fun

On May 13, on-chain data analyst Adam YuX posted Dune dashboard data showing that in the past 24 hours, Raydium's token issuance platform LaunchLab (including Letsbonk.Fun and other third-party issuance platforms built on LaunchLab) had graduated 198 tokens, surpassing Pump.fun's 171 token graduations.

Adam commented that this was the first time in history that Pump.fun had encountered real competition.

The feud between Pump.fun and Raydium has a long history.

In the early design of Pump.fun, token issuance needs to go through two stages: "internal market" and "external market" - after the token is issued, it will first enter the "internal market" trading stage, which relies on the pump.fun protocol's own Bonding Curve for matching. When the trading volume reaches US$69,000, it will enter the "external market" trading stage. At that time, liquidity will be migrated to Raydium, a pool will be established on the DEX and trading will continue to be open.

However, Pump.fun announced the launch of its self-built AMM DEX product PumpSwap on March 21. From then on, when Pump.fun tokens enter the "external market", the liquidity will no longer be migrated to Raydium, but will be directed to PumpSwap. This move directly cuts off the diversion path from Pump.fun to Raydium, thereby reducing the latter's trading volume and fee income.

In response, Raydium announced on April 16 that it had officially launched the token issuance platform LaunchLab, which allows users to quickly issue tokens through the platform and automatically migrate to Raydium AMM after the token liquidity reaches a certain scale (85 SOL). Obviously, 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 Fights Back at Pump.fun, Who Will Have the Last Laugh in the Meme Encore Season?"

LaunchLab's "Killer Weapon"

Although LaunchLab is similar to Pump.fun in terms of token issuance functions, its greatest feature is not in the issuance process itself - LaunchLab's architecture supports third-party integration, which enables external teams and platforms to create and manage their own launch environments within the LaunchLab ecosystem. In other words, third parties can rely on LaunchLab's underlying technology (the key point is that the liquidity pool remains in LaunchLab and Raydium) to launch an independent token launch front end.

The official interface of LaunchLab shows that there are currently more than ten third-party token issuance platforms built on LaunchLab, including the recently popular Bonk community token issuance platform Letsbonk.Fun. In fact, the vast majority of tokens graduated from the LaunchLab ecosystem currently come from Letsbonk.Fun (see "New coin issuance platform Letsbonk.fun becomes popular again, and IKUN becomes the latest top star on the platform?").

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

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

According to the latest official disclosure, as of today, Raydium has distributed approximately US$2.8 million (approximately 950,000 RAY) in rewards to traders on LaunchLab and Letsbonk.Fun, and the current daily incentive scale is approximately US$110,000.

Perhaps sensing the aggressive approach of the "wolves" of the LaunchLab system, Pump.fun was finally forced to give up some of its cake in order to attract more users to stay. Last night, Pump.fun announced that it would launch a "creator income sharing" mechanism, where token creators will receive 50% of the transaction income from the PumpSwap platform. From now on, after any user creates a token, as long as the token generates a transaction, the creator can continue to receive income. Officials said that the mechanism is designed to encourage more high-quality project parties to participate in ecological construction.

Meanwhile, another incident happened last night. The X page of Pump.fun briefly blocked Tom, the founder of Letsbonk.Fun, and some Raydium contributors, but I don’t know what happened…

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 ecosystem memes. It was only recently that emerging issuance platforms such as LaunchLab (purple