The most exciting crypto product business battle of 2025: Who will have the last laugh?

The "meme launchpad war" between pump.fun and Letsbonk.fun can already be booked as one of the most exciting crypto stories of the year. In the blink of an eye, we've arrived at early September, and pump.fun has once again taken the lead in this back-and-forth competition.

When thinking about how the "meme launchpad war" began, my first reaction is that pump.fun's brilliant performance throughout 2024 up to the beginning of this year has stirred the desire of many project teams to "get a piece of the pie."

In fact, this "meme launchpad war" is not simply a battle between asset issuance platforms. The moment pump.fun launched PumpSwap, transforming into an asset issuance + trading platform, this competition became inevitable. The two sides in this matchup are pump.fun and Raydium.

Honeymoon Period

pump.fun and Raydium were once in a symbiotic relationship. Before PumpSwap was born, pump.fun served as a meme coin issuance platform. When a new meme coin on pump.fun reached a market cap of $69,000, it would migrate to Raydium for trading.

The confusion among new meme players about "internal" and "external" markets, where the same coin has two different contract addresses, was precisely caused by this process.

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

For Raydium, pump.fun was like a rapidly developing "money printing machine," standing upstream of liquidity, while Raydium sat securely downstream. You eat one side, I eat the other.

Parting Ways

The honeymoon period between the two lasted until late February 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 posted a long tweet sharply commenting on the matter. The thread was already quite confrontational, essentially emphasizing that Raydium played a huge role in pump.fun's success and that Raydium was not so dependent on pump.fun in recent data. His sharpest words are shown below:

"pump.fun replacing Raydium with its own AMM is a strategic misjudgment"

In response to CoinDesk, @0xINFRA continued to state that the breakup wasn't so bad for Raydium and expressed concerns about pump.fun: "Any new AMM may encounter countless problems: incomplete infrastructure, low demand for token migration, and declining trading volume."

This news indeed hit Raydium's token price hard, with $RAY experiencing a nearly 30% drop, falling from $4.2 to below $3. The decline continued until mid-April, with lows near $1.5.

On March 21, pump.fun officially announced PumpSwap, and from then on, coins launched on pump.fun no longer had the distinction between internal and external markets. However, two days before PumpSwap was announced, on March 19, Cointelegraph reported that Raydium was about to launch its own launchpad, called "LaunchLab."

Raydium's official announcement came nearly a month later. On April 16, Raydium officially announced LaunchLab.

The former sweetness of "Brother stands at the bow, sister sits at the stern" is gone. These two biggest winners in the 2024 Solana meme coin frenzy, one going downstream and the other upstream, each brandishing swords in the other's territory.

The Battle

You may wonder, Raydium's LaunchLab didn't make much noise, aren't the main characters of the meme launchpad war pump.fun and Letsbonk.fun?

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

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

From this perspective, pump.fun's recent continuous support on Twitter for its own ecosystem's "newer coins," and even the establishment of the Glass Full Foundation to directly purchase meme coins from its own ecosystem, can be explained more rationally—PumpSwap's performance as an asset trading platform is highly correlated with pump.fun as the upstream asset issuance platform. Since PumpSwap is still new, it can only rely on meme coins produced by itself.

While many on-chain players are despairing about the meme coin market, calling the current meme coin market "hell mode," the coins supported by pump.fun have remained relatively strong amid the overall crypto market volatility. Whether it's $USDUC, $NEET, or $TOKABU, these meme tokens on pump.fun all provided ample "boarding" time at the $1 million to $3 million market cap stage, steadily rising to nearly $30 million 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 changes the previous fixed rate model. In the old system, creators received the same proportion of trading fee shares regardless of token market cap. Now, the system introduces a dynamic fee rate linked to market cap—the higher the token's market cap, the lower the creator fee, 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 cash-outs.

PumpSwap fee and content creator revenue for tokens of different market caps

Dynamic Fees V1 applies to all PumpSwap tokens, including both new and existing tokens, while maintaining the same protocol and liquidity provider fee distribution. For "abandoned" projects whose creators have disappeared, the fees will flow to the community. CTO projects can apply to receive creator fees, and Pump.fun promises to significantly speed up the approval process.

pump.fun officially claims that this update increases creators' potential earnings by 10 times. For creators who can successfully operate token ecosystems, this means they no longer need to profit by selling their holdings, but can instead earn stable income through ongoing trading fee sharing. This shift in model is a key step in Pump.fun's attempt to solve the widespread "pump and dump" problem in the memecoin ecosystem.

The future path chosen by pump.fun is "CCM" (Creator Capital Markets). Whether it's bringing in more streamers or solving the sustainability issue of meme coins' "one wave" phenomenon, essentially, pump.fun wants to attract more high-quality creators currently on Twitch, Tiktok, and other social media platforms by enabling "content monetization," launching a creator economy vampire attack from Web3 to Web2.

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

Not long ago, Letsbonk.fun's leading token $USELESS was also listed on Coinbase. Both events demonstrate that Letsbonk.fun's strength lies more in resource integration. With years of development in the Solana ecosystem, Letsbonk.fun continues to play its cards.

It's impossible to compare which of these two development paths is better or worse; it can only be said that pump.fun and Letsbonk.fun have shown different visions for development, and both are cleverly leveraging their strengths. As for the future, only time will tell.

Conclusion

The "meme launchpad war" was actually triggered by pump.fun and Raydium shifting from a cooperative symbiotic relationship to competition. On the surface, it's pump.fun vs Letsbonk.fun, but in reality, it's pump.fun + PumpSwap vs Letsbonk.fun + Raydium.

In this fierce business competition, we have indeed seen some positive changes, such as creator incentive mechanisms, incentives for CTOs or long-term meme coin operators, and so on. Only with sufficient competition will the market improve.