In 2025, the most exciting battle of products in the crypto world, who will laugh last?

Written by: Cookie

The “meme launchpad battle” between pump.fun and Letsbonk.fun can now be pre-ordered as one of the most exciting crypto stories of the year. In the blink of an eye, we have reached early September, and pump.fun has regained an advantage in this back-and-forth competition.

When I think about how the “meme launch pad battle” began, my first reaction is that the brilliant performance of pump.fun throughout 2024 to the beginning of this year has stirred the desire of many project parties to “slice the cake.”

In fact, this “meme launchpad war” is not simply a battle between asset issuance platforms. The moment pump.fun launched PumpSwap, turning into an asset issuance + trading platform, this competition became inevitable. The two sides in the confrontation 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 the issuance platform for meme coins. When the market value of the new meme coin on it reached 69,000 USD, it would migrate to Raydium for trading.

In the past, new meme players often felt confused about the “inner market” and “outer market”. The same coin has two different contract addresses, which is caused by this process.

In 2024, it is not only the golden age of pump.fun, but also the golden age of Raydium. According to data from Blockworks, Raydium's trading fee revenue in 2024 is expected to be about $160 million, more than five times that of 2023. Among this, the revenue from meme coin trading reached approximately $145 million, accounting for over 90% of the total annual revenue. Within this, meme coins from pump.fun contributed about $62.5 million in revenue, accounting for approximately 43% of meme coin revenue and about 39% of total revenue.

For Raydium, pump.fun is like a rapidly developing “money printer,” standing at the upstream of liquidity, while it sits steadily at the downstream of liquidity. You eat on one side, I eat on the other.

part ways

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

On February 24, someone on Twitter discovered that pump.fun was testing its own AMM liquidity pool. The next day, Raydium core contributor @0xINFRA published a lengthy tweet sharply criticizing this matter. This long tweet was actually filled with a strong sense of hostility, basically emphasizing that Raydium played a significant role in the success of pump.fun, and that recent data shows Raydium is not so dependent on pump.fun, etc. His most pointed words are in the following paragraph:

“Replacing Raydium with its own AMM is a strategic misjudgment for pump.fun”

In response to CoinDesk, @0xINFRA continued to express that the breakup with Raydium isn't that bad, and voiced his concerns about pump.fun, stating, “Any new AMM could encounter countless issues: inadequate infrastructure, low demand for token migration, and declining trading volume.”

This news has indeed dealt a blow to Raydium's coin price, with $RAY experiencing a nearly 30% drop, falling from $4.2 to below $3. The decline continued until mid-April, with the lowest point dropping to around $1.5.

On March 21, pump.fun officially announced PumpSwap, which means that there will no longer be a distinction between internal and external markets for the coins pumped. However, two days before the announcement of PumpSwap, on March 19, Cointelegraph reported that Raydium was about to launch its own launchpad called “LaunchLab.”

The official announcement regarding Raydium was delayed until nearly a month later. On April 16, Raydium officially announced LaunchLab.

The sweet days of “Brother, you stand at the bow, and sister, I sit at the stern” are gone. These two biggest winners in the 2024 Solana meme coin frenzy, one flowing downstream and the other upstream, each brandishing their swords toward the territory held by the other.

Great War

You may wonder, Raydium's LaunchLab hasn't made much noise either; aren't the main characters in the meme launch pad battle pump.fun and Letsbonk.fun?

Letsbonk.fun is made using Raydium's “Plug & Play SDK”. In simple terms, it can be understood that Letsbonk.fun is just a customized version of Raydium LaunchLab.

According to data from defillama, in April, May, and June, PumpSwap's total fee revenue and net fee revenue both surpassed Raydium. By July, when Letsbonk.fun suppressed pump.fun, Raydium's total fee revenue for the month was approximately 2.76 times that of the previous month, and its net fee revenue was about 4.66 times that of the previous month. Meanwhile, in July, PumpSwap's monthly total fee revenue was only about 30% of Raydium's, and its monthly net fee revenue was only about 18% of Raydium's.

From this perspective, pump.fun has been continuously supporting its own ecosystem's “new coins” on Twitter recently, and even established the Glass Full Foundation to directly purchase meme coins from its ecosystem. This can provide a more rational explanation - the performance of PumpSwap as an asset trading platform is very strongly correlated with pump.fun, the upstream asset issuance platform, because PumpSwap's foundation is still weak, and it can only rely on the meme coins produced by itself.

While many on-chain players feel desperate about the meme coin market, declaring that the current meme coin market is “hell-level difficulty,” the coins supported by pump.fun have maintained relative strength amidst the fluctuations of the overall cryptocurrency market. Whether it's $USDUC, $NEET, or $TOKABU, these meme assets on pump.fun have provided ample “boarding” time in the market cap range of 1 million to 3 million dollars, steadily rising to nearly 30 million dollars in market cap or even more.

Last week, pump.fun released the “Project Ascend” update, with the core change being the Dynamic Fees V1 system. This new tiered creator fee structure completely transforms the previous fixed-rate model. Under the old system, creators received the same proportion of transaction fee sharing regardless of the token's market value. Now, the system has introduced a dynamic fee rate linked to market value—tokens with higher market values have lower creator fees, while smaller projects continue to contribute higher fees. The logic behind this design is to encourage creators to focus on the long-term growth of tokens rather than short-term cashing out.

The fees for different market cap tokens corresponding to PumpSwap and the earnings for content creators.

Dynamic Fees V1 applies to all PumpSwap tokens, including newly issued and existing tokens, while maintaining the same protocol and liquidity provider fee distribution. For “abandoned” projects where the creators have disappeared, the fees will go to the community. CTO projects can receive creator fees by applying, and Pump.fun promises to significantly expedite the approval process.

Pump.fun officially claims that this update has increased the potential earnings of creators by 10 times. For those creators who can successfully operate a token ecosystem, this means they no longer need to profit by selling their holdings but can obtain stable income through continuous trading fee sharing. This shift in model is a crucial step that Pump.fun is trying to take to address the widespread “pump and dump” problem in the memecoin ecosystem.

The future path chosen by pump.fun is “CCM” (Creator Capital Markets). Whether it is attracting more live streamers or addressing the sustainable development issues of meme coins, essentially, pump.fun aims to attract more high-quality creators currently on social media platforms like Twitch and Tiktok by monetizing content creation, initiating a vampire attack on the creator economy from Web3 to Web2.

Letsbonk.fun, on the other hand, has chosen a different direction. On September 1st, the WLFI official Twitter announced that USD1 would be launched on Solana, stating, “Solana needs a dollar that is as vibrant as its core: instant execution, permissionless, and globally accessible. USD1 is backed 1:1 by reserve assets and was integrated with Raydium, BONK.fun, and Kamino on the very first day of its launch on Solana, bringing digital dollar stablecoins into the internet capital markets.” The BONK.fun official Twitter announced that it would become the official launchpad for WLFI's USD1 on Solana.

Not long ago, Letsbonk.fun's flagship $USELESS was also listed on Coinbase. Both of these events reflect that Letsbonk.fun's advantages are more focused on resource integration capabilities. With years of development in the Solana ecosystem, Letsbonk.fun continues to play its cards.

There is no way to compare the merits and demerits of these two development paths; all we can say is that pump.fun and Letsbonk.fun have already presented different development visions, and both are smartly leveraging their own strengths. As for what the future holds, only time can provide the answer.

Conclusion

“Meme Launchpad Battle” is actually ignited by the transition from a symbiotic relationship between pump.fun and Raydium to competition. On the surface, it is pump.fun vs Letsbonk.fun, but in reality, it is pump.fun + PumpSwap vs Letsbonk.fun + Raydium.

In this intense commercial competition, we have indeed seen some better changes, such as the creator reward mechanism, incentives for CTOs or those who sustain meme coins for a longer term, and so on. Only with sufficient competition can the market improve.