The meme launchpad war between pump.fun and Letsbonk.fun is already shaping up to be one of the most exciting crypto stories of the year. Fast forward to the beginning of September, and pump.fun has regained the upper hand in this back-and-forth battle.

When thinking about how the "meme launch pad war" began, my first reaction was that pump.fun's brilliant performance throughout 2024 and the beginning of this year aroused the desire of many project parties to "share the cake".

In reality, this "meme launchpad war" isn't simply a battle between asset issuance platforms. The moment pump.fun launched PumpSwap, transforming itself into an asset issuance and trading platform, this competition became inevitable. The two contenders are pump.fun and Raydium.

honeymoon period

pump.fun and Raydium have always had a symbiotic relationship. Before the birth of PumpSwap, pump.fun served as a meme token issuance platform. Once the market value of a new meme token on it reached $69,000, it would be migrated to Raydium for trading.

In the past, new meme players were easily confused about the "internal market" and "external market", and the fact that the same coin had two different contract addresses was caused by this process.

2024 will be a golden age not only for pump.fun but also for Raydium. According to Blockworks data, Raydium's transaction fee revenue in 2024 will be approximately $160 million, more than five times the amount in 2023. Of this, revenue from meme coin transactions alone will reach approximately $145 million, representing over 90% of the annual revenue. Of this, meme coins from pump.fun contributed approximately $62.5 million, accounting for approximately 43% of meme coin revenue and approximately 39% of total revenue.

For Raydium, pump.fun is like a rapidly developing "money printing machine," sitting at the upstream of liquidity while Raydium sits firmly at the downstream. You take one side, I take the other.

Parting ways

The honeymoon period between the two parties lasted until late February this year.

On February 24th, someone on Twitter noticed that pump.fun was testing its own AMM liquidity pool. The next day, Raydium core contributor @0 xINFRA published a lengthy tweet sharply commenting on the matter. The tweet was already quite charged with controversy, essentially emphasizing Raydium's significant role in pump.fun's success and that Raydium's recent data showed it was less reliant on pump.fun. His most pointed remarks were in the following paragraph:

“Pump.fun’s decision to replace Raydium with its own AMM was a strategic misjudgment.”

In a response to CoinDesk, @0xINFRA continued to say that the breakup wasn’t that bad for Raydium, and expressed his concerns about pump.fun: “Any new AMM is likely to encounter numerous problems: incomplete infrastructure, low demand for migration tokens, and declining trading volume.”

This news dealt a real blow to the price of Raydium, with $RAY experiencing a nearly 30% drop, from $4.2 to below $3. The decline continued until mid-April, reaching a low of around $1.5.

On March 21st, pump.fun officially announced PumpSwap, which eliminated the distinction between pumped and unpumped coins. However, two days before PumpSwap's official announcement, on March 19th, Cointelegraph broke the news that Raydium was about to launch its own launch platform, called "LaunchLab."

Raydium's official announcement didn't come until nearly a month later. On April 16, Raydium officially announced LaunchLab.

The sweet "brother, you stand at the bow, sister, I'll sit at the stern" moment is gone. The two biggest winners of the 2024 Solana meme coin frenzy, one swimming downstream, the other upstream, each staking their claim to the other's territory.

War

You might be wondering, Raydium's LaunchLab hasn't made much of a splash. Aren't pump.fun and Letsbonk.fun the protagonists of the meme launchpad war?

Letsbonk.fun is built using Raydium's "Plug & Play SDK." Simply put, it can be understood as a customized version of Raydium LaunchLab.

According to data from defillama, PumpSwap's gross and net fee revenue exceeded Raydium's in April, May, and June. By July, when Letsbonk.fun overtook pump.fun, Raydium's monthly gross fee revenue was approximately 2.76 times the previous month, and its net fee revenue was approximately 4.66 times higher. Meanwhile, in July, PumpSwap's monthly gross fee revenue was only approximately 30% of Raydium's, and its monthly net fee revenue was only approximately 18%.

From this perspective, a more rational explanation for pump.fun's recent support for its own ecosystem's "new coins" on Twitter, and even its establishment of the Glass Full Foundation to directly purchase its own meme coins, can be found. PumpSwap's performance as an asset trading platform is closely tied to pump.fun, its upstream asset issuance platform. This is because PumpSwap's foundation is still shallow, relying solely on its own meme coins.

While many on-chain players despair of the meme coin market, calling it "hellish," the currencies supported by pump.fun have remained relatively strong amidst the overall cryptocurrency market volatility. Whether it's $USDUC, $NEET, or $TOKABU, these meme tokens on pump.fun have all been given ample time to "get on board" within a market cap range of $1 million to $3 million, steadily rising to nearly $30 million in market capitalization or even higher.

Last week, pump.fun released its "Project Ascend" update, introducing the Dynamic Fees V 1 system as a key change. This new tiered creator fee structure radically changes the previous fixed-rate model. Under the previous system, creators received the same percentage of transaction fees regardless of their token's market capitalization. Now, the system introduces a dynamic fee structure tied to market capitalization—tokens with higher market capitalization receive lower creator fees, while smaller projects continue to contribute higher fees. The rationale behind this design is to encourage creators to focus on the long-term growth of their tokens, rather than short-term cashing out.

PumpSwap transaction fees and content creator earnings for tokens with different market capitalizations

Dynamic Fees V 1 applies to all PumpSwap tokens, both newly issued and existing, while maintaining the same protocol and liquidity provider fee distribution. For "abandoned" projects whose creators have disappeared, fees will flow to the community. CTO projects can apply to receive creator fees, and Pump.fun promises a significantly faster approval process.

Pump.fun claims this update increases creators' potential earnings tenfold. For creators who successfully manage the token ecosystem, this means they no longer need to sell their holdings to profit, instead earning a steady income from ongoing transaction fee sharing. This shift in model is a key step in Pump.fun's efforts to address the widespread "pump and dump" problem within the memecoin ecosystem.

Pump.fun's chosen path is "CCM" (Creator Capital Markets). Whether it's attracting more livestreamers or addressing the sustainability issues of meme tokens, pump.fun essentially aims to attract more high-quality creators currently on social media platforms like Twitch and TikTok through "content creation monetization," launching a vampire attack on the creator economy from Web 3 to Web 2.

Letsbonk.fun, however, chose a different approach. On September 1st, WLFI's official Twitter account announced the launch of USD 1 on Solana, stating, "Solana needs a USD that is as dynamic as its core: instant, permissionless, and globally accessible. USD 1 is backed 1:1 by reserve assets and will integrate with Raydium, BONK.fun, and Kamino on Solana's first day, bringing the digital dollar stablecoin to the internet capital markets." BONK.fun's official Twitter account announced that it would become WLFI's official USD 1 launch pad on Solana.

Not long ago, Letsbonk.fun's flagship product, $USELESS, was also listed on Coinbase. Both of these developments demonstrate that Letsbonk.fun's strengths lie in its resource integration capabilities. Leveraging years of development within the Solana ecosystem, Letsbonk.fun continues to make significant strides.

It's impossible to compare the two paths, but we can say that pump.fun and Letsbonk.fun have each demonstrated distinct visions and are each intelligently leveraging their strengths. As for the future, only time will tell.

Conclusion

The "meme launchpad war" was actually triggered by the shift in the cooperative relationship between pump.fun and Raydium to competition. On the surface, it was pump.fun vs. Letsbonk.fun, but in reality, it was pump.fun + PumpSwap vs. Letsbonk.fun + Raydium.

In this vigorous commercial competition, we have indeed seen some positive changes, such as the creator reward mechanism, incentives for CTOs or longer-term sustainable operations of meme coins, etc. Only with sufficient competition can the market be better.

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