The Game Between Raydium and Pump Fun: Can LaunchLab Ignite a New Wave of Wealth Creation?

In the Solana ecosystem, Raydium serves as a leading decentralized exchange, while Pump Fun is the largest project incubation platform. Although their business directions differ, they have recently engaged in fierce competition, trying to capture more market share and revenue.

The catalyst for this competition was Pump Fun launching its own trading platform, PumpSwap. The platform's recent daily trading volume has stabilized around $400 million, approaching Raydium's $600 million daily trading volume. Even more notably, Raydium officials revealed that in the past month, Pump Fun contributed to as much as 41% of its automated market maker (AMM) revenue. However, with the launch of PumpSwap, Raydium's traffic has significantly decreased, forcing it to introduce LaunchLab to "reclaim liquidity dominance."

So, what is the difference between LaunchLab and Pump Fun? Which projects are worth paying attention to? Let's delve into it.

LaunchLab Overview

Raydium's LaunchLab is essentially a "no-code token issuance tool combined with automated liquidity migration services," mainly offering two usage modes:

1. JustSendIt Mode: Users can create tokens with one click, presetting a fundraising goal of 85 SOL. Once the fundraising is successful, the funds will be automatically transferred to the Raydium AMM pool, and the LP tokens will be burned to achieve liquidity locking.

2. LaunchLab Pro Mode: Users can customize the total supply of tokens, with a minimum fundraising amount as low as 30 SOL. In addition, they can set the price curve slope, vesting conditions, and whether to enable AMM profit sharing (up to 10% of trading fees can be refunded to the project party).

In terms of fee structure, Raydium charges a uniform base fee of 1%. The distribution of these fees is as follows: 50% goes to the "community pool", 25% is used to repurchase $RAY tokens, and 25% is allocated for infrastructure development and operational funds.

It is worth noting that LaunchLab allows third parties to access its backend services to build their own token issuance front-end interfaces. The most notable among these is cook.meme, which is the first "meme coin issuance platform" that uses the LaunchLab contract but has its own user experience front-end. This platform features zero fees, instant transactions, and a simple interface, attracting many developers to try it out. Its positioning is similar to a replica of the user interface of Pump Fun, but the underlying liquidity is tied to Raydium.

Raydium adopts this open model not only to attract traffic but also to replicate the content and ecosystem flywheel effect built by Pump Fun through the community frontend back in the day.

Key Project Analysis

The launch of LaunchLab undoubtedly benefits the $RAY token (25% of the fees are used for buybacks). After the announcement of LaunchLab, the price of $RAY rose by about 8%. If LaunchLab can maintain its popularity, the buyback strength of $RAY will increase, and when demand exceeds supply, the chances of price increases will rise.

The lifecycle of the LaunchPad platform largely depends on how many "Golden Dog" projects it can generate. When the platform continuously creates wealth effects, user assets will naturally concentrate on that platform. Once assets are concentrated, the probability of giving birth to "Golden Dogs" will also increase, ultimately forming a positive flywheel effect.

However, it is regrettable that within 24 hours of LaunchLab going live, only the market capitalization of the $TIME token exceeded 1 million USD. Other tokens such as $ARUA and $Gaydium, although their market capitalizations skyrocketed in the initial stages, ultimately, market forces determined that only a single high market capitalization token was favored.

Here are a few projects worth paying attention to:

1. $TIME

   • Current market value: 6 million USD
   • Highest Market Cap: $8.5 million
   • 24-hour trading volume: 30.2 million USD
   • Number of holders: 7,600

2. $ARUA: A token issued by Raydium, which was deployed earlier than $TIME but launched later.

3. $Gaydium: In addition to the homophonic pun, the developers of Raydium briefly posted the contract address of $Gaydium on Raydium's GitHub, but it was deleted less than an hour later, causing the token price to plummet.

Conclusion

Although Raydium's LaunchLab seems like a "late counterattack", its overall design has systematically responded to the advantages of Pump Fun. LaunchLab not only offers a customizable token issuance model but also expands its ecosystem through an open front-end strategy represented by cook.meme, aiming to redirect traffic, transaction fees, and market enthusiasm back to the Raydium ecosystem.

However, whether LaunchLab can truly create a wealth effect and reignite a wave of meme coin frenzy still depends on three core factors:

1. Whether it can incubate enough strong and popular projects;
2. Are the fees and liquidity design user-friendly for ordinary users?
3. Can the ecosystem quickly gather frontend tools to form a network effect?

At present, it seems that all three elements still need to be strengthened. However, considering that LaunchLab has been launched for less than a month, it is still too early to declare the platform a failure. The cryptocurrency market is ever-changing, and perhaps the next hundredfold return meme coin will be born on the LaunchLab platform. Let’s wait and see how this competition within the Solana ecosystem will evolve and what surprises it will bring to the market.