Solana Meme platform melee, has Raydium become the "invisible winner"?

Original | Odaily Daily Report

Author | Azuma

Original title｜Why is Raydium considered the biggest beneficiary of Letsbonk.fun's rise?

Letsbonk.fun has recently completed a counterattack against the "big brother" Pump.fun on the data level.

On-chain analyst Adam's data dashboard on Dune shows that recently Letsbonk.fun (the orange part in the image below) has surpassed Pump.fun (the green part in the image below) in both daily deployed tokens and daily graduated tokens, becoming the most popular Meme token launch platform in the current market.

With the strong rise of Letsbonk.fun, more and more people have begun to try to find potential wealth codes on this platform, but many have overlooked another big winner after the data surge of Letsbonk.fun — Raydium.

Why is it said that the rise of Letsbonk.fun will benefit Raydium? The story starts with the feud between Pump.fun and Raydium.

The rebate from Pump.fun, the counterattack from Raydium

In a brief overview, in the early design of Pump.fun, the token issuance goes through two phases: "internal" and "external". After the token issuance, it will first enter the "internal" trading phase, which relies on the Bonding Curve of the pump.fun protocol for matching. Once the trading volume reaches $69,000, it will enter the "external" trading phase, at which point liquidity will migrate to Raydium, where a pool will be established on this DEX and trading will continue.

However, Pump.fun announced the launch of its self-built AMM DEX product PumpSwap on March 21. Since then, the liquidity of Pump.fun tokens when entering the "foreign market" will no longer be migrated to Raydium, but will be directed to PumpSwap - this move directly cuts off the flow path of Pump.fun to Raydium, thereby reducing the latter's trading volume and fee income.

In response, Raydium announced on April 16 that it has officially launched the token issuance platform LaunchLab, allowing users to quickly issue tokens through the platform and automatically migrate to Raydium AMM once the token liquidity reaches a certain scale (85 SOL). Clearly, this is Raydium's direct counterattack against the aggressive Pump.fun.

So what does this have to do with Letsbonk.fun?

Value Flow: Letsbonk.fun, LaunchLab, Raydium

Although LaunchLab's token issuance function is similar to Pump.fun, its biggest feature is not in the issuance process itself — the architecture of LaunchLab supports third-party integrations, allowing external teams and platforms to create and manage their own launch environments within the LaunchLab ecosystem. In other words, third parties can rely on LaunchLab's underlying technology and Raydium's liquidity pools to launch independent token launch frontends.

The protagonist of this article, Letsbonk.fun, is a third-party launch platform developed by the BONK team based on LaunchLab.

As a third-party platform developed based on LaunchLab, Letsbonk.fun adopts the fee mechanism of LaunchLab. For all Meme tokens issued based on Letsbonk.fun, LaunchLab will charge a 1% joint curve issuance fee, of which 25% is directly used for RAY repurchase; in addition, after the tokens break out of the "internal market", Raydium will also charge based on the fee rules of the liquidity pool, and some of those fees will be used for RAY repurchase.

Odaily: The fee buyback ratio of different types of liquidity pools in Raydium.

Blockworks data shows that since the launch of LaunchLab on April 16, both the protocol revenue and RAY buyback volume of Raydium have seen significant growth, with their growth trajectory highly overlapping with the data fluctuations of the LaunchLab series platforms. On May 13, the LaunchLab series platform surpassed Pump.fun in the number of token graduations for the first time, and that day Raydium reached a recent buyback peak of $325,000. Additionally, with the recent surge of Letsbonk.fun, Raydium's protocol revenue and RAY buyback volume have shown a notable increase again.

What is more noteworthy is that previously, Raydium's protocol revenue mainly came from the exchange fees of liquidity pools (the purple part in the figure below), but recently, the revenue from the issuance fees of LaunchLab (the yellow part in the figure below) has gradually overtaken it, becoming Raydium's new main source of income, and 25% of these fees will be directly used for the repurchase of RAY.

Based on the repurchase data of 249,000 USD from yesterday, Raydium will be able to invest approximately 90.88 million USD annually for the repurchase of RAY, while the current market capitalization of RAY is about 749 million USD. This means that 12% of the RAY market capitalization will be repurchased each year, which will create a huge and sustained buying pressure.

In addition to memes, there is also tokenization of US stocks.

In addition to the steadily increasing revenue from LaunchLab fees, the recently popularized tokenization of US stocks is also expected to boost Raydium's protocol revenue.

Previously, Kraken's tokenized stock platform xStocks has officially launched and issued a series of tokenized certificates for popular U.S. stocks on Solana, most of which have already deployed liquidity pools on Raydium. Although the current trading volume is still limited and the fee contribution is not significant, considering the market trend of tokenizing U.S. stocks, this sector also has strong revenue growth expectations.

Looking ahead, if Letsbonk.fun can continue to maintain its current market share (even without considering the growth of LaunchLab and other third-party platforms), Raydium is expected to maintain its current protocol revenue level and buyback efforts. Coupled with the potential growth expectations in U.S. stock trading, this data is likely to achieve further breakthroughs.