The Evolution of Meme Launchpads

The crypto meme landscape is heating up as new platforms emerge to provide unique twists on the traditional Launchpad model, catching the attention of investors and researchers alike. While the decentralized exchange (DEX) market is buzzing with activity, these meme-focused platforms are silently amassing fortunes in the background.

As blockchain projects increasingly seek avenues to issue tokens to the public through initial decentralized offerings (IDOs), decentralized platforms, commonly known as Launchpads, are stepping in to fill the void. These platforms serve as fundraising channels for project parties and provide investors with opportunities to participate in high-quality projects at an early stage. However, in the realm of memes, the narrative takes a different turn.

The Launchpads introduced in this issue are more pertinent to meme launch platforms. In contrast to the traditional Launchpads, the market value of the online tokens is lower, typically 100% of the circulation, and the threshold for users to issue tokens is minimal, potential for a wealth effect is magnified.

The meme coins on Pump Fun are being sold at the price of 0.01, and the total revenue will be directly credited to the project party's account. Usually, native projects on Solana, in order to avoid being criticized for "scamming" and to be closer to Solana officials, will pledge the SOL they earn or operate nodes on their own. However, Pump Fun does the opposite and keeps selling its SOL in exchange for USDC.

Since 2025, they have sold a staggering $317 million worth of SOL tokens.

Not only does this move look bad, but coupled with previous scandals such as live broadcasts and lawsuits, although Pump Fun is extremely profitable in the Solana ecosystem, it is not the object of support from the foundation.

In terms of its meme coins, Pump Fun has become the first choice for coin issuance platforms. It is an entry traffic website and a non-segmented track, so you can see a variety of themes in it, including animals, homophones, news events, AI, etc. Basically, as long as you can think of something or a concept, it can be turned into a meme coin. Therefore, in terms of the platform, its tokens do not have any special features. Currently, the preferred platform for token issuance is still Pump Fun.

Compared with Pump Fun, LetsBonk is obviously more politically orthodox. The main reason is that BONK is the most representative meme coin on the Solana chain, the original meme coin with wealth effect, and a project that has been deeply rooted in Solana for more than four years. In addition to Toly's recent retweet, BONK can be seen in various offline activities of Solana. In terms of relationships, BONK is obviously more pleasing than Pump Fun's behavior of selling coins all day long.

In terms of platform mechanism, LetsBonk is also more selfless than Pump Fun, with a revenue of 1% of transaction fees, of which the amount will be used for:

* 0.1% will be allocated to the Points system for early users and long-term holders of the platform token.

* 0.9% will be used to buy back and burn the platform token to maintain the long-term value of the token.

Coupled with the cooperation with Raydium's LaunchLab, it can be said that LetsBonk's overtures to the Solana ecosystem are quite sincere.

At present, the token with the highest market value of LetsBonk is Hosico, which is 38 million US dollars. It is inspired by a Scottish straight-eared cat named "Hosico". Hosico is a golden short-haired cat born on August 4, 2014. With nearly 2 million fans on social media (such as Instagram) due to its round face, big eyes and cute appearance, it has become a world-renowned Internet celebrity cat.

Other tokens worth noting include the same-name tokens Letsbonk and Grassiot

Letsbonk was initially regarded as the representative of the official platform currency. On the first day of the platform's launch, the market value of the currency reached a maximum of 30 million US dollars. Subsequently, due to the emergence of various tokens and the division of attention, it fell sharply, and now the market value is only 4 million US dollars.

The attention paid by the founder of the platform, TOM, is crucial to the tokens launched on LetsBonk. For example, although the initial price of Grassiot was not high, after being bought and destroyed by TOM, the price soared to 13 million US dollars at one point, but later fell sharply to 4.3 million US dollars. In simple terms, the token price rose through the attention of the founder, but later TOM said that he bought the coin only for support, without any inside information and not a developer, and even disclosed that he also held Hosico and LetsBonk, and disclosed the purchase amount