The most exciting cryptocurrency product war in 2025, who can laugh to the end

# The "Meme Launchpad War" Between pump.fun and Letsbonk.fun

By: Cookie  

The "meme launchpad war" between pump.fun and Letsbonk.fun is already a shoo-in for one of the most exciting crypto stories of the year. Before we know it, we’ve reached early September, and pump.fun has once again taken the upper hand in this back-and-forth competition.  

When I think about how the "meme launchpad war" began, my first thought is that pump.fun’s brilliant performance from 2024 to the start of this year has stirred up the desire of many project teams to "get a slice of the pie."  

In fact, this "meme launchpad war" is not merely a battle between asset issuance platforms. The moment pump.fun launched PumpSwap and transformed into an "asset issuance + trading platform," this competition became inevitable. And the two sides of the showdown are pump.fun and Raydium.  

## The Honeymoon Phase  

pump.fun and Raydium once maintained a symbiotic relationship. Before the birth of PumpSwap, when pump.fun served as a meme coin issuance platform, any new meme coin on its platform would migrate to Raydium for trading once its market capitalization reached $69,000.  

In the past, new meme coin investors often felt confused by the "internal market" and "external market"—where the same coin had two different contract addresses—and this process was exactly the reason behind it.  

2024 was not only a golden year for pump.fun but also for Raydium. According to data from Blockworks, Raydium’s transaction fee revenue in 2024 was approximately $160 million, more than five times that of 2023. Among this figure, revenue from meme coin trading reached around $145 million, accounting for over 90% of its annual revenue. Of this meme coin-related revenue, meme coins from pump.fun contributed approximately $62.5 million, making up about 43% of meme coin revenue and roughly 39% of total revenue.  

For Raydium, pump.fun was like a rapidly growing "money printer" standing upstream of liquidity, while Raydium itself sat steadily downstream. You take a share, and I take a share—they coexisted harmoniously.  

## The Split  

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

On February 24, someone on Twitter noticed that pump.fun was testing its own AMM (Automated Market Maker) liquidity pool. The next day, @0xINFRA, a core contributor to Raydium, posted a long thread of tweets commenting sharply on the matter. This thread was already filled with a strong confrontational tone, essentially emphasizing that Raydium had played a crucial role in pump.fun’s success and that, based on recent data, Raydium was not as dependent on pump.fun as it seemed. His most incisive remarks were the ones in the image below:

# "pump.fun Replacing Raydium with Its Own AMM Is a Strategic Miscalculation"  

When responding to CoinDesk, @0xINFRA continued to assert that the split was not that bad for Raydium, while also expressing his concerns about pump.fun: "Any new AMM is likely to encounter countless problems: incomplete infrastructure, low demand for token migration, and declining trading volume."  

This news dealt a real blow to Raydium’s token price. $RAY plummeted by nearly 30%, falling from $4.2 to below $3. The decline continued until mid-April, with the price dropping to around $1.5 at its lowest point.  

On March 21, pump.fun officially announced PumpSwap. From then on, tokens launched on pump.fun no longer had the distinction between "internal market" and "external market." However, two days before PumpSwap’s official announcement—on March 19—Cointelegraph reported that Raydium was about to launch its own launchpad, named "LaunchLab."  

Raydium’s official announcement came nearly a month later. On April 16, Raydium formally unveiled LaunchLab.  

The once "sweet collaboration"—like "you stand at the bow, I sit at the stern"—was gone. These two biggest winners of the 2024 Solana meme coin boom, one moving downstream and the other upstream, began to challenge each other’s territories.  

## The War  

You might wonder: Raydium’s LaunchLab didn’t generate much buzz, so shouldn’t the protagonists of the meme launchpad war be pump.fun and Letsbonk.fun?  

In fact, Letsbonk.fun was built using Raydium’s "Plug & Play SDK." Simply put, Letsbonk.fun can be understood as 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 exceeded Raydium’s. In July—when Letsbonk.fun overshadowed pump.fun—Raydium’s monthly total fee revenue was approximately 2.76 times that of the previous month, and its net fee revenue was about 4.66 times higher. Meanwhile, in July, PumpSwap’s monthly total fee revenue was only around 30% of Raydium’s, and its monthly net fee revenue was merely about 18% of Raydium’s.  

From this perspective, there is a more rational explanation for why pump.fun has been continuously promoting "recently launched tokens" in its ecosystem on Twitter recently, and even established the Glass Full Foundation to directly purchase meme coins in its own ecosystem: PumpSwap’s performance as an asset trading platform is strongly linked to pump.fun (the upstream asset issuance platform). Since PumpSwap has a weak foundation, it can only rely on the meme coins launched on its own platform.  

While many on-chain users despaired of the meme coin market, describing it as "extremely difficult," the tokens supported by pump.fun maintained relative strength amid fluctuations in the broader cryptocurrency market. Whether it was $USDUC, $NEET, or $TOKABU, these meme tokens on pump.fun all provided ample "entry time" when their market capitalization was between $1 million and $3 million, and steadily rose to a market cap of nearly $30 million or more.  

Last week, pump.fun released the "Project Ascend" update, whose core change was the Dynamic Fees V1 system. This new tiered creator fee structure completely replaced the previous fixed-rate model. Under the old system, creators received the same percentage of trading fee shares regardless of their token’s market cap. Now, the system introduces dynamic fees tied to market capitalization: the higher a token’s market cap, the lower the creator fee, while small-scale projects continue to contribute higher fees. The logic behind this design is to encourage creators to focus on the long-term growth of their tokens rather than short-term cash-outs.  

### PumpSwap: Trading Fees and Creator Earnings by Token Market Cap  

Dynamic Fees V1 applies to all PumpSwap tokens, both newly issued and existing ones, while maintaining the same protocol and liquidity provider fee distribution. For "abandoned" projects where creators have disappeared, fees will be directed to the community. CTO projects can apply to receive creator fees, and pump.fun has pledged to significantly speed up the approval process.  

Officially, pump.fun claims that this update increases creators’ potential earnings by 10 times. For creators who successfully operate their token ecosystems, this means they no longer need to sell their holdings to profit; instead, they can earn stable income through ongoing trading fee shares. This model shift is a key step for pump.fun to address the widespread "pump and dump" issue in the meme coin ecosystem.  

The future path chosen by pump.fun is "CCM" (Creator Capital Markets). Whether it is attracting more live streamers or solving the sustainability problem of meme coins’ "one-time boom," 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 "creator economy vampire attack" from Web3 to Web2.  

Letsbonk.fun, however, has chosen to pursue a different direction. On September 1, WLFI’s official Twitter announced the launch of USD1 on Solana, stating: "Solana needs a dollar as dynamic as its core: instant execution, permissionless, and globally accessible. USD1 is backed 1:1 by reserve assets and integrated with Raydium, BONK.fun, and Kamino on its first day of launch on Solana, bringing digital dollar stablecoins to the internet capital market." BONK.fun’s official Twitter announced that it would serve as WLFI’s official USD1 launchpad on Solana.  

Not long ago, $USELESS—the leading token on Letsbonk.fun—was also listed on Coinbase. Both events demonstrate that Letsbonk.fun’s advantage lies more in its ability to integrate resources. Leveraging its years of accumulation in the Solana ecosystem, Letsbonk.fun continues to make strategic moves.  

It is impossible to compare the pros and cons of these two development paths. It can only be said that pump.fun and Letsbonk.fun have developed different visions for the future, and both are wisely leveraging their own strengths. As for what the future holds, only time will tell.  

## Conclusion  

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

Amid this intense commercial competition, we have indeed seen some positive changes, such as the creator reward mechanism and incentives for CTOs (or those committed to the long-term operation of meme coins). Only with sufficient competition can the market develop better.  

### Disclaimer  

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not constitute investment advice on this platform. This platform makes no guarantees regarding the accuracy, completeness, originality, or timeliness of the information in the article, nor does it assume any liability for any losses arising from the use of or reliance on the information contained herein.