The most exciting cryptocurrency product sales battle in 2025, who can have the last laugh
Pump.fun vs LetsBonk.fun's “Meme Launchpad Battle” can already be pre-ordered for one of the year's best crypto stories. In a blink of an eye, we've arrived at the beginning of September, and pump.fun has once again taken advantage of this competition. When thinking about how the “meme launcher war” began, my first reaction was that pump.fun's brilliant performance from 2024 to the beginning of this year influenced the desire of many project parties to “split the cake.” In fact, this “meme launcher war” is not simply a war between asset distribution platforms and asset distribution platforms. The moment pump.fun launched PumpSwap and became an asset issuance+trading platform, this competition was inevitable. The opposing sides are Pump.fun and Raydium. Pump.fun and Raydium have always had a symbiotic relationship during the honeymoon period. Prior to the birth of PumpSwap, pump.fun acted as a meme coin distribution platform, and when the market value of the new meme coin on it reached $69,000, it migrated to Raydium for trading. In the past, new meme players were easily confused about the “internal market” and “external market”. The same coin had two different contract addresses. It was this process that led to this process. 2024 is not only a golden age for pump.fun, but also a golden age for Raydium. According to Blockworks, Raydium earned approximately $160 million in transaction fee revenue in 2024, which is more than five times that of 2023. Of this, revenue from meme coin transactions reached approximately $145 million, more than 90% of the annual revenue. Among these, meme coins from pump.fun contributed about $6.25 million in revenue, accounting for about 43% of meme coin revenue and 39% of total revenue. For Raydium, pump.fun is like a “money printer” that is rapidly developing. It stands at the top of liquidity, while it sits steadily in the downstream of liquidity. You eat one side, I eat the other. The honeymoon period for the couple who parted ways continued until late February of this year. On February 24, someone on Twitter discovered that pump.fun was testing its AMM liquidity pool. The next day, Raydium core contributor @0xINFRA posted a lengthy tweet commenting on the matter. This long tweet actually has a strong smell of gunpowder. Basically, it emphasizes that Raydium played a huge role in the success of pump.fun, and that Raydium doesn't rely that much on pump.fun according to recent data, etc. His sharpest statement is the one below: “Pump.fun replacing Raydium with its own AMM is a strategic misdecision.” In response to CoinDesk, @0xINFRA continued to say that the breakup wasn't that bad for Raydium and expressed his concerns about pump.fun, “Any new AMM may encounter numerous problems: poor infrastructure, low demand for migration tokens, and declining transaction volume.” The news actually hit Raydium's currency price. $RAY experienced a drop of nearly 30%, falling below $3 from $4.2. The decline continued until mid-April, when the lowest was around $1.5. On March 21, pump.fun officially announced PumpSwap. Since then, the coins pumped out are no longer divided between internal and external markets. However, two days before PumpSwap was officially announced, on March 19, Cointelegraph revealed that Raydium would soon launch its own launcher called “LaunchLab.” Raydium's official announcement was long overdue until close to a month later. On April 16, Raydium officially announced LaunchLab. What used to be “brother, stand at the bow of the boat, sister, I'm at the stern” is no longer sweet. These two are the most in the 2024 Solana meme coin frenzy...
