Over the past year, the Meme coin issuance platform Launchpad market on the Solana chain has experienced explosive growth and quickly formed a fiercely competitive landscape. Pump.fun, as the earliest rising platform, is seen as a catalyst for the prosperity of the Solana ‘casino’ on the chain. The platform allows any user to issue tokens without thresholds, adopts a bonding curve pricing, and pioneers a fair issuance model with no presale or team allocation.

With Solana’s advantages of low-cost, high-speed transactions, Pump.fun detonated the meme coin frenzy in 2024. In just 13 months, platform users issued more than 8 million tokens, peaking on October 24, 2024, with more than 36,000 tokens produced in a single day, with an average of 25 new tokens being born every minute. This unprecedented scale of token creation allowed Pump.fun to dominate the market for a time, and also made Solana known as the largest “casino” on the chain. However, the success of Pump.fun also comes with concerns. On the one hand, a large number of low-quality projects have emerged, with a graduation rate of less than 1%, and the vast majority of tokens are short-lived. On the other hand, the platform is highly profitable but users generally lose money, statistics show that nearly 90% of users lose their principal or make less than $100 in meme coin trading, while the platform has received about $98 million in just 6 months.

By the end of 2024, the official revenue of Pump.fun has accumulated to over 223 million US dollars (about 1.15 million SOL), and continues to liquidate the earned SOL. In just a year and a half, the platform’s fee account has sold approximately 3.403 million SOL (about 629 million US dollars), becoming the second largest source of selling pressure after FTX/Alameda, an early investor in Solana. Such a huge outflow of funds has raised concerns in the community about the sustainability and ecological impact of the platform. Faced with the dominance of Pump.fun, market participants have taken swift action, leading to fierce competition in the entire Meme Launchpad track. Within the Solana ecosystem, the veteran decentralized trading platform Raydium has launched LaunchLab to compete with Pump.fun; the popular meme coin BONK has opened LetsBonk.fun launchpad; and the on-chain aggregator Jupiter has also attempted to launch similar services.

Daily token deployment situation, data from @adam_tehcDUNE coin

Pump.fun Challenges

Pump.fun, as a pioneer of the meme coin one-click launch platform, has established a basic operation mode. Users only need to fill in basic information such as token name and symbol, without programming skills, they can automatically deploy token contracts and establish trading pools, greatly reducing the threshold for issuing coins. The platform uses a variety of bonding curve pricing models to balance initial prices and market demand. The issued tokens can be traded immediately in the platform’s AMM pool without the need to inject liquidity in advance.

The platform innovatively introduces the LP token burning mechanism. When the new coin reaches a specific market value threshold, part of the liquidity will be automatically injected into the Raydium trading pool and the corresponding LP tokens will be burned, ensuring that the project party cannot withdraw liquidity and run away, thereby improving liquidity security.

With the experience of “codeless coin issuance and instant trading”, Pump.fun quickly became popular in 2024, giving rise to a large number of creative meme coins, including many coins with hundredfold or even thousandfold increases, attracting numerous speculators. By extracting trading fees, the platform has become one of the most profitable on-chain applications in 2024.

However, as development progresses, the issues of Pump.fun gradually become apparent: less than 1% of the over 8 million issued tokens successfully ‘graduate’ into external liquidity pools; user profits are severely polarized, leading to a zero-sum game; the platform monetizes fees and continues to sell SOL, putting selling pressure on the Solana network; the completely anonymous and unaudited model, while in line with the spirit of encryption, brings regulatory and trust risks. As a result, Pump.fun’s growth slowed down in early 2025, with daily trading volume dropping from the peak of $544 million in January to $270 million in February, a decrease of nearly 50%.

Pumpfun’s token graduation rate weekly trend continues to decline

LaunchPad’s Wheel War - LaunchLab, Boop, Believe

LaunchLab’s on-chain Degen strategy

Raydium LaunchLab is one of the most direct competitors of Pump.fun in the Solana ecosystem. Raydium itself is an important AMM protocol on Solana, benefiting early on from Pump.fun contributing 41% of its swap fee revenue. However, with Pump.fun launching PumpSwap independently, Raydium’s traffic and trading volume have been significantly impacted.

In March 2025, Raydium launched LaunchLab, which was seen as a direct counterattack to Pump.fun. The platform’s overall mechanism is highly similar to Pump.fun, both supporting one-click coin issuance and curve pricing, but with targeted optimizations in detail.

Supporting a diverse pricing curve, allowing project parties to choose linear, logarithmic, or exponential models based on token positioning; setting a lower transaction fee of only 1%, lower than Pump.fun’s 2%, and without additional migration costs; the graduation threshold has also been lowered, with only 85 SOL (approximately $11,000) needed to enter the Raydium AMM pool; at the same time, introducing a creator revenue-sharing mechanism, allowing the founders of graduated tokens to continue to receive 10% of the fee sharing; the platform has also strengthened ecological integration, including the repurchase of platform coin RAY with transaction fees, support for LP lockups, and the introduction of diverse valuation, among other innovative designs.

On the day of the announcement, RAY coin surged 14%, and the market has high hopes for Raydium LaunchLab. While the official statement claims LaunchLab is ‘providing alternative choices,’ it has successfully attracted some projects to switch, weakening the dominance of Pump.fun.

In addition, multiple platforms such as LetsBonk.fun jointly launched with the BONK community, as well as Meteora, Boop, Genesis Launches, etc., are also making efforts to break through and drive the entire Launchpad market into a full competitive stage.

The daily active users of LaunchLab are growing rapidly.

Believe, a unique approach, creatively narrates the concept of productization.

As the Meme Launchpad track becomes increasingly crowded, the ‘rebirth’ of the Believe project has attracted widespread attention in the industry.

As the Meme Launchpad track becomes increasingly crowded, the rebirth of the Believe project has attracted widespread attention in the industry. Founded by Australian entrepreneur Ben Pasternak, Believe, formerly known as the social token platform Clout. Ben has created several popular apps and successfully monetized them, but Clout quickly faded due to over-reliance on celebrity effects. At the end of April 2025, Ben returned to the market with an upgraded platform, Believe, shifting the concept from ‘Believe in Someone’ to ‘Believe in Something,’ emphasizing the value belief in creativity and ideas, marking the platform’s strategic transformation from social asset trading to a creative incubator factory.

I personally commented on this change as a shift from ‘influence’ to ‘trust.’ We are no longer hyping celebrities, but looking for meaningful projects.

Believe adopts a unique product mechanism, using social platform as the entry point for issuing coins, achieving seamless connection between Web2 and Web3. Users only need to on the X platform @LaunchACoinAnd with the token name attached, the system automatically uses the Meteora joint curve to create tokens, without logging into the DApp or filling out a form. This ‘discussion is issuance’ interaction mode allows any valuable ideas to be immediately converted into tokens, significantly reducing the entry barrier. The platform also sets up the ‘B point’ mechanism, where when the token fee income reaches a critical value, the founder can withdraw funds to support the project; if it does not meet the standard, it is considered market veto. Although the B point is not a hard numerical threshold, the logic behind it is similar to the Kickstarter-style crowdfunding mechanism ‘transaction heat is market voting’.

Alliance DAO founding partner Imran Khan once commented on ‘founders or Scout tags’@LaunchACoinA token is born. The market will value it based on the importance of the problem the creativity aims to solve, in short, the market’s heat determines the fate of the project.

In terms of the revenue structure, Believe has also made a series of innovative designs. A 2% fee is charged for each transaction. Unlike other LaunchPads, its token still incurs a 2% trading tax within the contract after launch. However, its distribution structure is highly incentive-oriented: 1% is allocated to the token creator (founder), 0.1% is rewarded to the Scout (the user who first discovered or promoted the token), and the remaining 0.9% goes to platform operations. This mechanism not only provides immediate income protection for creators but also for the first time includes ‘token discoverers’ in the income-sharing system, greatly incentivizing the community to actively discover and spread high-quality creative ideas.

Since its launch, Believe has recorded a total trading volume of $1.8 billion, bringing $9.5 million in direct income to creators, of which $4.7 million belongs to Believe token transactions.

According to BelieveScan panel data, Believe’s transaction fee income in the past 24 hours is approximately 10 million.

While issuing coins openly, Believe also attempts to govern the platform order to a certain extent, avoiding it becoming a haven for junk coins.

In terms of creator incentives, Believe’s mechanism is to share 1% of each transaction directly with the issuer; there is no reserve holding or token ratio control, and founders can freely define distribution; the establishment of the Scout incentive mechanism promotes decentralized content discovery; the platform actively displays transaction volume, creator income, and other data to enhance transparency. The participation of some Web2 entrepreneurs has also enhanced Believe’s Meta temperament. RizzGPT developer Alex Leiman, well-known hacker Ruben Norte, and others have all issued personal tokens on the platform, with project valuations once reaching millions of dollars, pushing Believe’s image closer to a “creative value experimental field” from a purely Meme player paradise.

This narrative logic is particularly evident in the LaunchCoin event. The token was originally issued by Ben as PASTERNAK, and was renamed LaunchCoin when it was launched on the platform, with functional significance. LaunchCoin skyrocketed 200 times on the day of its launch, with a market value exceeding 200 million US dollars, sparking intense discussions in the community for a while.

Some users see it as a sign of the platform officially entering the governance token stage; others question whether Ben is using his founder identity for arbitrage. In the end, Ben sold most of his holdings in batches, making a profit of about 1.3 million US dollars. The fate of LaunchCoin has sparked heated debates in the community around the core theme of ‘trust.’ Whether supporters or skeptics, this storm has successfully brought Believe’s brand positioning back to the center of discussion and validated the attention to its core value direction.

The trust narrative emphasizes the value behind creativity, no longer simply encouraging speculative operations, attracting more rational builders and entrepreneurs, while the interest bundling mechanism allows creators, Scouts, and platforms to all have profit mechanisms, binding participants’ interests at the economic level, continuously motivating quality content. In this mechanism, despite the emergence of many Web2 talents with products launching tokens at present.

But the real feedback from the community after participation is that after the token is launched, most of the chips are taken by robots. Due to the high initial tax, there are fewer sell orders. High-quality projects will quickly reach a market value of over 5-10 million USD. Subsequently, as the trading tax decreases, robots with a large amount of chips will sell a large amount, resulting in many tokens with market values rising to hundreds of even tens of millions. However, the sustainability is not very good. Some in the community believe that it is good for entrepreneurs, scouts, and platforms, but these are all paid for by retail investors.

Ben hopes to seek a dynamic balance between ‘empowering real value projects’ and ‘restraining blind speculation and bubbles’ through Believe. Although there is still controversy in the market about whether it really has a long-term vision, at the current stage, Believe has successfully established a differentiated label in the Meme Launchpad battle with mechanism innovation, topical events, and explosive data.

Head platform key differences comparison

After experiencing the dust and follow-up imitation of Pump.fun and other platforms, the current Meme Launchpad market has formed multiple leading camps. The following is a horizontal comparison of Pump.fun, Raydium LaunchLab, Boop, and Believe in key dimensions.

Issuance method and threshold

Pump.fun, LaunchLab, and SunPump all adopt the DApp page-style one-click coin issuance, where users need to log in and fill in relevant token information to complete the deployment process. Believe, on the other hand, completely breaks away from the DApp paradigm by triggering coin issuance through Twitter social links, without the need to enter the platform page.

From the perspective of the threshold, Boop, Pump.fun, and LaunchLab have almost no requirements for the issuer. Any user can issue coins at any time. Believe seems to have zero threshold on the surface, but in reality, it has formed a certain ‘natural selection’ through the social relationship network, attracting the crowd who follow entrepreneurs like Ben and Alex to become the first batch of creators and participants.

In terms of ‘graduation threshold,’ Pump.fun was initially set at a market value of $69,000; LaunchLab was initially set at 85 SOL, approximately $11,000, but can be set with a minimum launch mode of 30 SOL, with a lower threshold; while Believe does not set a fixed threshold, judging the acceptance of the idea based on the ‘B point’ transaction fee income.

Fee structure and distribution mechanism

Pump.fun charges a 2% transaction fee, initially all owned by the platform, starting from May 2025, 50% will be returned to the creators; LaunchLab has a transaction fee rate of 1%, of which 25% is used to repurchase the platform coin RAY, founders can apply for an additional maximum of 10%; Believe charges a 2% transaction fee and is embedded in the token contract, with 1% going to the creators, 0.1% to Scout, and 0.9% reserved by the platform. From the data, Believe offers the highest profit-sharing ratio to creators among all platforms, while pioneering Scout profit-sharing incentives, allowing discoverers to continue to benefit.

Community participation and governance

Pump.fun follows extreme liberalism, with no review or governance mechanism. The community relies on spontaneous organization for hot topic dissemination, but this also makes it susceptible to manipulation by market makers, leading to retail investors ‘losing more and winning less’.

Raydium LaunchLab leverages its AMM background, binds DeFi community resources, and conducts ecosystem internal circulation through platform coin incentives; Boop relies on Dingaling’s previous influence in the community.

Believe attempts to incorporate community consensus decision-making elements into governance. Through coin holding governance, Snapshot voting, and other methods, discussions are held on whether the token will enter the DEX liquidity pool, support promotion, etc., forming a preliminary framework of ‘issuing coin is governance’. If successful in the future, its user community stickiness is expected to far exceed current mainstream platforms.

Creator economic model

In terms of creator incentives, Believe and LaunchLab are the most attractive. Believe, in addition to returning 1% of the handling fee when issuing coins, has built a flywheel effect of issuing coins, attracting new users, and issuing coins again by combining the Scout reward mechanism.

LaunchLab retains creators through low thresholds, high freedom, and RAY buyback, while Pump.fun loses some attractiveness in the new environment due to the lack of early incentive mechanisms.

LaunchPad market outlook

As the Meme Launchpad market transitions from the explosive stage to the mature stage, some key trends are emerging, providing reference directions for platform competition and industry evolution.

The data boom recedes, and fine-grained competition begins

On-chain data shows that the frenzy of meme coin issuance is subsiding. Taking Pump.fun as an example, its daily trading volume and daily coin issuance have significantly decreased in early 2025, and the ‘overnight wealth’ myth is difficult to replicate on a large scale.

This means that the era of rapid growth is coming to an end, and the competition between platforms will shift towards refined operations. Those who can continuously create explosive products, increase the income of creators, and improve user trading experience will take the initiative in the next wave. Data from Pump.fun, where users vote with their feet (halving transaction volume), also indicates that if platforms cannot improve the profit and loss structure and emotional experience of participants, even the first-mover advantage will gradually be eroded.

The business model is shifting from “harvesting” to “win-win”.

The early profit model of Pump.fun is simple and rude: the platform charges fees, users have a very low winning rate in the game, forming a one-sided structure of ‘platform wins, users lose’. The new platforms represented by Believe and LaunchLab generally adopt the approach of benefiting creators and communities for growth.

For example, Believe will directly return 1% of the handling fee to the founder, encouraging creators to continue producing content; LaunchLab, on the other hand, builds a more endogenous growth ecosystem through fee sharing and RAY repurchase. In the future, Launchpad will place more emphasis on a win-win situation among the platform, creators, and users, forming a truly ‘content incentive network’.

Pump.fun recently launched a creator profit-sharing mechanism, which can also be seen as this new model pushing old players.

Multi-chain pattern becomes the norm, and each ecosystem explores its own Meme soil

With the competition in the Solana platform (Pump.fun, LaunchLab, BONK) heating up, other public chains are also stepping up their deployment of their own Meme Launchpads: SunPump from Tron, Boop from Solana, Genesis Launches from Base, and even projects from the ICP and Avalanche ecosystems are starting to test the waters.

Essentially, the Meme issuing platform has become a weapon for public chains to attract active users. Due to its low threshold and strong topical nature, Meme coin is naturally suitable for building online traffic.

In the future, major public chains may give birth to one or two top Meme Launchpads, deeply integrating with wallets, social, and NFT tools, becoming important indicators of ecosystem activity and user loyalty.

Community culture and narrative construction will become the platform’s moat

The core of Meme is not in technology, but in narrative. The platform itself is no exception:

Pump.fun was founded on the principle of “ultimate freedom, absolute openness”, but it also led to problems such as rampant market manipulation by whales and poor-quality projects;

Raydium emphasizes ‘fair launch, technical optimization,’ shaping the image of ‘Avengers’ and striving to attract back native users;

Boop will feed back the personal brand ‘Dingaling’ and the ecological $Boop, focusing on the value recovery of the core token;

Believe follows the path of ‘trust and value’, trying to attract the Builder community and use creativity as the source of Meme.

In the future, community culture will directly determine the platform’s attraction to different user groups: whether it leans towards Degen (pure speculation), KOL (influencer type), Builder (value-oriented), or mass users (entertainment-oriented). Platform differentiation will no longer be limited to product mechanisms, but will extend to emotional consensus and cultural atmosphere.

In terms of the daily token deployment ratio, Pumpfun’s market share has changed from a significant monopoly to 57%.

From Meme to ICM, a new path for entrepreneurial incubation emerges

While 99% of Meme coins are still short-term speculative products, some projects have begun to try to “transition from Meme to product”. Some founders use transaction fees to establish an initial capital pool, start to build a team, and develop prototypes; some platforms, such as Believe, encourage founders to fulfill their Roadmap by releasing startup capital after reaching the B point mechanism.

The community has begun long-term observation and governance of some tokens, such as LaunchCoin, which has experimental value in governance, profit sharing, and function expansion. If a small number of Meme projects are successfully incubated as actual products through Launchpad in the future, their ‘symbolic’ significance will have a profound impact on the entire industry: it proves that Launchpad can not only incubate speculative coins but also nurture Web3 project targets. At that time, Launchpad will no longer be just an ‘issuance tool,’ but a ‘project cold start infrastructure’.

Summary

Meme Launchpad is standing at the critical point of transitioning from a barbaric eruption to refined operation. The situation where Pump.fun dominates alone has been broken, and platforms like Raydium LaunchLab and Believe are entering the market with differentiated strategies, gradually seizing users and creators’ share.

The future winner in the industry may not necessarily have the lowest transaction fees, but the one that can build a content flywheel, community consensus, and platform trust mechanism. Believe has initially established its own differentiated moat through social distribution, Scout incentive mechanism, and governance exploration, demonstrating strong iterative and growth potential. Of course, this is still a marathon-style competition. A platform that truly stands out must achieve a balance in multiple dimensions such as ‘cultural identity, win-win for creators, ecological governance, security and compliance’.

As Ben Pasternak said, “We are not just a platform, we want to give every good idea a possibility of monetization.” This may be the most trustworthy direction for the next stage of Meme Launchpad.

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