Hyperstition #4 — May 6, 2025
Pump.fun's market share squeezed, Pumpkin migrates to LaunchLab, GoFundMeme overhauls fees, and more.
Pump.fun feels the squeeze as launchpad wars escalate
Pump.fun has started to feel the squeeze as Solana’s token launchpad wars heat up, according to data from Dune Analytics.
As of May 5, the OG memecoin launchpad — once practically a monopoly on Solana — has seen its share of daily coin creations dwindle to some 82%, the data shows.
The remaining market share has been largely coopted by two projects: Raydium’s LaunchLab, at nearly 12%, and Boop at around 6%, according to the Dune data.
Pump.fun is still the dominant memecoin launchpad. But a trendline is starting to form.
As competition intensifies, the OG launchpad’s dominant market share risks ‘death by a thousand cuts’. Expect Pump.fun to fight back.
Expanding LaunchLab Ecosystem
LaunchLab poses the most significant threat.
Raydium rolled out LaunchLab in April as a counterweight to Pump.fun’s own in-house decentralized exchange (DEX), PumpSwap, launched one month prior. Pump.fun had previously migrated graduated tokens to Raydium.
LaunchLab is more than a solo launchpad. Its smart contracts also serve as a permissionless backend for several other projects.
Some are gaining traction, and they all tout unique features designed to gain an edge with users.
Letsbonk, a launchpad created by the BONK memecoin’s community, is among them.
Launched on April 25, Letsbonk wooed BONK’s roughly 400,000 tokenholders by promising to use trading fee revenue to buy back BONK tokens.
It worked. On its first day live, Letsbonk purportedly eclipsed Pump.fun in new coin launches.
On April 27, buoyed by activity on Letsbonk, LaunchLab briefly approached a 25% share of the launchpad market, according to Dune.
On May 5, Pumpkin — a Pump.fun competitor launched in March — migrated its backend to LaunchLab, too.
The launchpad has struggled to gain market share but seeks to stand out by paying 30% of trading fees to coin creators and another 35% to memecoin stakers.
It cited enhanced visibility, bigger Solana rewards for coin creators, and built-in staking for every launchpad token as reasons for the switch.
Boop’s Splashy Debut
Meanwhile, activity on Boop — which Hyperstition covered extensively in our previous issue — has partly rebounded from a sharp decline in the days after its May 1 rollout.
On May 5, the launchpad minted more than 2,100 new tokens, up from 1,100 the day prior, according to data from Dune Analytics.
Praise from top influencers, including Pow and Ansem, has helped.
So has Boop’s strategy of paying influencers large BOOP allocations to launch coins on its platform.
In a similar vein to Pumpkin, Boop promises to pay stakers 60% of trading fees plus a 5% share of every token launched on the platform, according to Web3 researcher Eli5DeFi.
Staying on Top
Pump.fun isn’t taking the competition sitting down.
In April, Pump.fun restored livestreaming, bolstering moderation to avoid resuscitating what some saw as 2024’s “memecoin freakshow”.
In a March 20 X post, Pump.fun tipped plans for its own creator fee sharing mechanism, adding that the rollout is “coming soon.”
In Other News…
GoFundMeme updates fee structure
GoFundMeme, a Pump.fun competitor, announced a fee overhaul designed to pivot to “a trader first approach.” As of May 5, the launchpad will evenly split swap fees between stakers of its native GFM token and trader rewards.
By the Numbers…
