The Ecological Battle Between Raydium and Pump Fun: Can LaunchLab Reshape the Wealth Myth on Solana?

In the Solana ecosystem, Raydium serves as a leading decentralized exchange, while Pump Fun is the largest token issuance platform. Despite operating in different business areas, the two have engaged in fierce ecological competition, aiming to capture more market share and revenue.

Recently, the daily trading volume of PumpSwap launched by Pump Fun has stabilized at around $400 million, approaching Raydium's $600 million. Even more notably, Pump Fun has contributed up to 41% of the automated market maker (AMM) revenue for Raydium in the past month. However, with the rise of PumpSwap, Raydium's traffic has significantly decreased, forcing it to launch LaunchLab to "reclaim liquidity dominance."

So, what is the difference between LaunchLab and Pump Fun? What projects are worth paying attention to? Let's dive in together.

LaunchLab Overview

The LaunchLab launched by Raydium is essentially a "no-code token issuance tool combined with automatic liquidity migration services," mainly offering two usage modes:

1. JustSendIt Mode: Users can create tokens with one click, preset to raise 85 SOL, and upon success, automatically migrate to Raydium's AMM while destroying LP tokens to lock liquidity.

2. LaunchLab Pro mode: Allows for customizable total supply, with a minimum fundraising amount of 30 SOL. It is possible to adjust the price curve slope, vesting conditions, and whether to enable AMM profit sharing (up to 10% of transaction fees can be returned to the project party).

In terms of fee structure, Raydium charges a uniform base fee of 1%, of which 50% goes to the "community pool", 25% is used to repurchase RAY tokens, and 25% serves as infrastructure and operation funds.

LaunchLab also allows third-party interfaces to connect to its backend services, establishing independent token issuance frontends. The most well-known of these is cook.meme, a platform focused on meme coin issuance, featuring zero fees, instant transactions, and a clean interface, which has attracted many developers to try it out.

Raydium adopts this open strategy not only to attract traffic but also to replicate the content and ecological flywheel effect built by the Pump Fun community front end.

Key Project Analysis

The launch of LaunchLab directly benefits the RAY token (25% of the fees are used for buybacks). After the announcement of LaunchLab, the price of RAY increased by approximately 8%. If LaunchLab can maintain its popularity, the buyback strength of RAY will continue to increase, potentially driving the price up.

The vitality of the LaunchPad platform depends on how many "golden dog" projects it can incubate. As the platform continuously creates a wealth effect, user assets will naturally concentrate on the platform, forming a positive cycle.

Within 24 hours of LaunchLab going live, only the market capitalization of the TIME token surpassed 1 million USD. Other tokens such as ARUA and Gaydium experienced a surge in market capitalization initially, but ultimately the market chose to focus on supporting a single high market cap token.

Here are a few projects worth paying attention to:

1. TIME

   • Current Market Cap: 6 million USD
   • Highest Market Cap: 8.5 million USD
   • 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 pun, the developers of Raydium briefly posted the contract address of Gaydium on Raydium's GitHub, but quickly deleted it, causing fluctuations in the token price.

Conclusion

Although Raydium's LaunchLab seems like a late response, its overall design has systematically addressed the advantages of Pump Fun. It not only provides a customizable token issuance model but also expands the ecosystem through open front-end strategies like cook.meme, aiming to bring traffic, transaction fees, and market narratives back to the Raydium ecosystem.

Whether LaunchLab can truly achieve wealth creation effects and reignite the meme coin craze still depends on three core factors:

1. Can it incubate a popular project?
2. The design of fees and liquidity in relation to retail user friendliness
3. Can the ecosystem quickly gather front-end tools to form network effects?

Currently, these three aspects still need further development, but considering that LaunchLab has been launched for less than a month, it is too early to determine its success or failure. The cryptocurrency market is constantly changing; perhaps the next meme coin with a hundredfold return will be born on the LaunchLab platform. Let's wait and see.