After Pump.fun went “solo” as an AMM, Raydium is fighting back. This morning, Blockworks reported that Raydium has launched LaunchLab, a Meme coin launch platform similar to Pump.fun.
Perhaps as a result of this news, Raydium token Ray rose up about 30% to $2.07, before falling back to about $1.80 as of press time.
But after the Solana eco-meme fever subsided, Raydium and Pump.fun broke up with each other, will there be a winner in the end?
Each other or early dissent
Raydium LaunchLab, essentially a forked version of Pump.fun, but optimized and improved. For example, unlike Pump.fun, which only supports SOL as an offer token, LaunchLab will support a variety of offer tokens, providing users with more choices.
While Raydium’s move to take over Pump.fun may seem like a forced counterattack, it may have been intended to be.
Infra, a core contributor to Raydium, mentioned in an interview with Blockworks that he had started developing LaunchLab “months ago” but had put it on hold because he “didn’t want the team to feel like Raydium was competing directly with them”. “But with Pump.fm, it’s been a long time coming, and we’re still working on it.
But with Pump.fun’s AMM plans surfacing, Raydium might as well stop pretending altogether.
In this round of meme boom, Pump.fun and Raydium can be said to be the best “partner”.
Pump.fun token issuance mechanism is divided into “internal” and “external”. When the transaction volume of tokens issued by users on Pump.fun reaches 69,000 dollars, it will enter the “outside” trading stage.
Outside trading mainly relies on Raydium, which provides a deep liquidity pool and stability to help the tokens on Pump.fun trade better. However, Raydium will charge 0.25% for each transaction, and Pump.fun needs to pay a lot of fees for this.
As the AMM platform at the head of Solana’s ecosystem, it is also because of the explosion of meme and Pump.fun that it can be said to have made a lot of money in recent year.
The 2024 Memecoin Annual Spending Report shows that in 2024 the Solana ecological meme coin transactions generated at least over $3.093 billion in fees. Raydium or more than $1 billion of that amount, while Pump.fun earned only $240 million.
But last month, Raydium’s layaway model was shattered when Pump.fun launched its own AMM in an attempt to rid itself of Raydium’s dependence. Raydium’s token, Ray Token, fell more than 20% on the same day on the news.
The purpose of Pump.fun’s self-built AMM is also clear, the money given to Raydium wants to put in their own pockets, in addition, after the self-built AMM, Pump.fun can fully control the rules of the liquidity pool and the distribution of fees, and may have a stronger control over the users.
And as the biggest beneficiary of Pump.fun, Pump.fun’s flying solo does have a huge impact on Raydium’s revenue.
According to Blockworks Research, Pump.fun’s Meme coins accounted for 41% of Raydium’s transaction fee revenue over the past 30 days.
But the good news is that Raydium did make money, and after the sharp drop and the threat of Pump.fun going solo, Raydium still has about $168 million on its balance sheet to support its attempts at a new meme-launching platform, according to Blockworks Research.
Difficulties, can there be a winner after the “breakup”?
Solana eco-meme fever has recently receded, and the market’s attention has temporarily shifted to Coin’s BSC chain.
Both Raydium and Pump.fun have plummeted from their highs.
According to DeFillam data, Raydium’s TVL has slipped about 60 percent to $1.1 billion from a high of $2.7 billion at the end of January, and its daily transaction fees have fallen more than 90 percent to about $800,000 from $10 million at the end of January, while the token price has fallen more than 75 percent to about $1.8 from a high of $7.6.
Pump.fun’s transaction fees also fell more than 95 percent to $800,000 from a high of $15 million. Yesterday, only one token on Pump.fun had a market capitalization of more than $1 million in 24 hours, according to Lookonchain monitoring.
It may also be that because of the sharp drop in revenue, the money is not good anymore, and neither Pump.fun nor Raydium want to make money for each other.
But can Pump.fun and Raydium be winners when they make imitations of each other?
A current reality is that the overall market is low, the market would have been a bit weak under the long term PVP, and Solana eco-meme’s attention has shifted to the BSC chain.
