The Battle Between Raydium and Pump Fun: Can LaunchLab Reshape the Industry Landscape?

In the Solana ecosystem, Raydium, as a leading decentralized exchange, has engaged in an interesting competition with Pump Fun, the largest token issuance platform. Although their business focuses differ, they are both trying to expand their operations to capture more market share and revenue.

Pump Fun has launched PumpSwap, which has stabilized its daily trading volume at around $400 million, gradually approaching Raydium's $600 million. Raydium has stated that over the past month, Pump Fun contributed up to 41% of its automated market maker (AMM) revenue. However, with the rise of PumpSwap, Raydium's traffic has been significantly impacted. In response to this situation, Raydium has launched the LaunchLab project in an attempt to regain dominance over liquidity.

LaunchLab Overview

LaunchLab is essentially a platform that integrates "no-code token issuance tools" and "automatic liquidity migration services." It mainly provides two usage modes:

1. JustSendIt Mode: Users can create tokens with one click, with a default fundraising goal of 85 SOL. After successful fundraising, the funds will be automatically transferred to Raydium's AMM pool, and the LP tokens will be burned to lock liquidity.

2. LaunchLab Pro Mode: Provides more customization options, including total supply, minimum fundraising amount (as low as 30 SOL), price curve slope, vesting conditions, and whether to enable AMM revenue sharing (up to 10% of transaction fees returned to the project team).

In terms of fee structure, Raydium charges a flat 1% base fee. The distribution of these fees is as follows: 50% goes into the "community pool", 25% is used to buy back $RAY tokens, and the remaining 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 of these is cook.meme, a platform focused on meme coin issuance, characterized by zero fees, instant transactions, and a clean user interface, attracting considerable attention from developers.

Raydium adopts this open strategy not only to attract traffic but also hopes to replicate the content and ecosystem flywheel effect built by the community frontend of Pump Fun.

Key Project Analysis

The launch of LaunchLab has directly driven the price of the $RAY token up by about 8%. If LaunchLab can maintain its popularity, the buyback strength of $RAY will further increase, potentially bringing more room for price growth.

The success of LaunchLab largely depends on whether it can incubate "star projects". As the platform continuously creates a wealth effect, user assets will naturally converge towards the platform, forming a positive cycle.

In the first 24 hours after LaunchLab went live, only the market value of the $TIME token broke the $1 million mark. Other tokens like $ARUA and $Gaydium performed well initially, but ultimately the market seemed to favor a single high market cap token.

Here are a few projects worth paying attention to:

1. $TIME

   • Current Market Value: 6 million USD
   • Highest Market Cap: 8.5 million USD
   • 24-hour trading volume: 30.2 million USD
   • Number of holding addresses: 7,600

2. $ARUA: Issued by Raydium official, although deployed earlier, it launched later.

3. $Gaydium: In addition to the name pun, its contract address briefly appeared in the Raydium GitHub repository before being deleted, leading to significant fluctuations in the token price.

Outlook

Raydium's LaunchLab, although seemingly a belated counterattack, has systematically responded to the advantages of Pump Fun through its design. It not only offers customizable token issuance models but also expands the ecosystem through open front-end strategies like cook.meme, aiming to bring traffic, fees, and market hotspots back to the Raydium ecosystem.

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

1. Is it possible to incubate a trending project?
2. Are the fee and liquidity designs friendly to small investors?
3. Can the ecosystem quickly gather front-end tools and create network effects.

Although there is still room for improvement in these three areas, it is too early to determine the success or failure of LaunchLab, considering it has just been launched for less than a month. The cryptocurrency market is ever-changing, and perhaps the next meme coin project with a hundredfold return will be born on the LaunchLab platform. Let's wait and see and witness the development trajectory of this emerging platform.