Key Takeaways
RAY token surged 28% after Raydium announced its LaunchLab platform to compete with Pump.fun.
The meme coin sector has been declining, with market cap dropping significantly since its peak.
RAY, Raydium’s utility and governance token, surged around 28%, rising from $1.6 to $2 on Tuesday following reports that the firm is rolling out its own meme coin launchpad that could challenge Pump.fun, the go-to platform for meme token debuts.
According to Blockworks, Raydium’s meme coin factory, called LaunchLab, will maintain a similar bonding curve as Pump.fun but will differentiate by allowing third-party user interfaces to set fees.
Plus, the platform will support multiple quote tokens and link with Raydium’s liquidity provider locker for perpetual swap fee security.
The development of LaunchLab surfaced less than a month after Pump.fun reportedly tested its own AMM, a move that signaled its intention to pull away from Raydium.
This could hugely impact Raydium, which has derived substantial revenue from Pump.fun’s token pools.
Rumors of Pump.fun’s AMM feature triggered a 30% drop in RAY’s value, CoinMarketCap data shows.
This decline intensified as the crypto market experienced a widespread correction shortly thereafter, fueled by escalating tariff tensions and a deteriorating macroeconomic environment.
In the past month, RAY has plummeted by around 60%.
Declining interest in meme coins
Pump.fun’s graduation rate, which refers to the percentage of tokens that successfully transition from the incubation phase to full tradability on a Solana DEX, has been below 1% since February 17, according to Dune Analytics.
Historically, the highest graduation rate was 1.67% in November 2024, but even then, the absolute number of successful tokens was significant due to the large volume of launches.
The current low graduation rate reflects declining investor interest in meme coins, commonly perceived as high-risk investments.
According to CoinMarketCap data, the meme coin sector’s market cap is down around 65% from its peak on December 9 last year.
Despite short-lived optimism ahead of Trump’s inauguration, the majority of meme tokens were in a bloodbath post-inauguration date.
And despite slight improvements in liquidity, the overall crypto market, including Bitcoin, remains under pressure with no major recovery in sight for meme coins.
That being said, while Raydium’s established presence could provide a competitive edge, the debut of its meme coin launchpad may face initial hurdles.
Commenting on Raydium’s move, Ceteris, Head of Research at Delphi Digital, said that Raydium will likely encounter a fundamental issue of user engagement.
While Raydium provides the underlying liquidity infrastructure, platforms like Pump.fun and aggregators such as Jupiter effectively control the user interface and experience, according to the analyst.
“Pump.fun owns the user, Raydium is just back-end infra. Even when users go to trade after bonding they go to Jupiter. [Most probably] don’t even realize they’re Raydium pools,” Ceteris said. “Much harder to own the user than to create a vanilla AMM.”
Story Protocol’s Jongwon Park added, “in fact, crypto UX gets better when you abstract away 10s of AMMs. Products are king, and liquidity in AMM follows products.”
