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Solana Dex and automated market maker Raydium have initially launched a token launchpad similar to Pump.fun’s direct fork.
The release of a platform named LaunchLab took place less than a month after news broke that the highly popular Solana Memecoin Launchpad Pump.Fun was developing its own AMM, essentially cutting off its unofficial partnership with Raydium. LaunchLab provides linear, exponential, and logarithmic bond curves that match the demand and price of a token. It also allows third-party UISs to set their own pricing.
The Pump.Fun token, which reaches a market capitalization of $69,000, has some liquidity accumulated and burned in the Raidium trading pool. Pump.Fun MemeCoins accounts for 41% of Raydium’s swap fee revenue over the past 30 days, according to BlockWorks Research. Raydium’s native token crashed 25% in February as investors expect Raydium’s revenues to be big drawdown after Pump.Fun began moving to pump’s in-house AMM.
Even after the flash crash, Raydium holds approximately $168 million on its balance sheet for each Blockworks investigation. The good thing about having a big war chest is that companies can quickly move things like suddenly building pumps.
Anonymous Raydium Core Contributor Infra said the protocol had begun developing LaunchLab “a few months ago,” but continued to shelved the project because “the teams aren’t competing when Raydium is directly competing.” After the emergence of Pump.Fun’s AMM plan, generosity appears to have dried up.
Raydium believes Pump.Fun has discovered that the product market is partially fitting due to Raydium’s infrastructure, Infra told me. However, they believe that Raydium’s liquidity pool could be a draw for users, but Infra didn’t cast Launchlab as a Pump.fun Killer.
“LaintLab is not about replacing pumps or other platforms. It’s an alternative for teams who don’t want to develop their own programs from scratch, or for pump users who prefer Raydium’s AMM V4 to move around the pool,” Infra wrote in a text message.
In addition to providing new bonding curves and flexible fees, LaunchLab also supports multiple non-SOL citation tokens and integrates with Raydium’s liquidity provider locker. This allows issuers to secure constant token swap fees. Laintlab is the first of the wider “tool suite” that Raydium is pushing out to create tokens, Infra said.
