Original Article Title: "Pump.fun Hegemony Shaken for the First Time, Raydium's 'Wolf Pack' Strategy Pays Off"

Original Article Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily

On May 13, on-chain data analyst Adam posted Dune Analytics data on X, showing that in the past 24 hours, the token launch platform under Raydium, LaunchLab (including third-party launch platforms built on LaunchLab such as Letsbonk.Fun), had a token graduation count of 198 tokens, surpassing Pump.fun's token graduation count of 171 tokens. Adam commented on this, saying, "This is the first time in history that Pump.fun has encountered real competition."

History of Feud

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

In the early design of Pump.fun, token issuance required passing through two phases, "inner circle" and "outer circle"—after token issuance, it would first enter the "inner circle" trading phase, relying on Pump.fun's own Bonding Curve for matching, and when the trading volume reached $69,000, it would enter the "outer circle" trading phase, at which point liquidity would migrate to Raydium, where a pool would be created and trading would continue.

However, on March 21, Pump.fun announced the launch of its self-built AMM DEX product, PumpSwap, after which Pump.fun tokens, when entering the "outer circle," would no longer migrate liquidity to Raydium, but would direct it to PumpSwap—this directly cut off Pump.fun's flow path to Raydium, thereby reducing the latter's trading volume and fee revenue.

In response, on April 16, Raydium announced the official launch of the token launch platform, LaunchLab, allowing users to quickly launch tokens through the platform, and once the token liquidity reached a certain threshold (85 SOL), it would automatically migrate to the Raydium AMM. Clearly, this is Raydium's direct counterattack against the surging Pump.fun.

Odaily Note: For more details, please refer to "Data Analysis: How Much Does Raydium Rely on Pump.fun?" and "Raydium Counters Pump.fun, Meme Revival Season: Who Will Have the Last Laugh?".

LaunchLab's "Killer Move"

While LaunchLab is quite similar to Pump.fun in terms of token issuance features, its biggest feature is 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 rely on LaunchLab's underlying technology (with the liquidity pool still remaining on LaunchLab and Raydium) to launch independent token launch frontends.

As shown on the LaunchLab official interface, there are currently over ten third-party token issuance platforms built on LaunchLab, including the recent hot Bonk community token issuance platform Letsbonk.Fun—in fact, the vast majority of graduating tokens within the LaunchLab ecosystem currently come from Letsbonk.Fun (refer to "New Token Issuer Letsbonk.fun Ignites Again, IKUN Becomes the Latest Star of the Platform?").

In short, LaunchLab's strategy is to leverage third-party platforms like Letsbonk.Fun to collectively attack Pump.fun with a "pack wolf" strategy, and based on the current trend, this strategy has already begun to show results.

In addition, Raydium launched its incentive program ahead of Pump.fun to provide incentives for issuance and trading activities on LaunchLab and related third-party platforms. According to the latest official disclosure, to date, Raydium has allocated approximately $2.8 million (about 950,000 RAY) in rewards to traders on LaunchLab and Letsbonk.Fun, with the current daily incentive release size being around $110,000.

Pump.fun Forced to Respond

Feeling the pressure from LaunchLab's "wolf pack," Pump.fun has finally been forced to share a slice of its cake to attract more user retention—last night, Pump.fun announced the launch of a "Creator Revenue Sharing" mechanism, where token creators can receive a 50% share of the transaction fees on the PumpSwap platform. Starting today, any user who creates a token and generates transaction activity will continuously earn income. The official statement mentioned that this mechanism aims to incentivize more high-quality projects to participate in ecosystem development.

Meanwhile, a minor incident occurred last night where Pump.fun's X page briefly blocked Letsbonk.Fun founder Tom and some Raydium contributors, but the specific details remain unknown...

Will the Meme Issuance Track See a Shake-up?

As shown in the chart below, starting from mid-2024, Pump.fun (green section) has largely dominated the Solana ecosystem's Meme issuance, until recently when emerging issuance platforms like LaunchLab (purple section) and Boop (blue section) have gradually started to gain market share.

For any market, competition is not a bad thing for the average user, because more intense competition often forces incumbent parties to share more profits and provide a better user experience —just like the recent battle between JD and Meituan in China. From an average user's perspective, perhaps we should look forward to LaunchLab continuing to strengthen its position and seeing more new players similar to LaunchLab emerging.

Original Article Link

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