The token issuance platform has rolled up, but did you make any money?

Author: Jesse, BUBBLE

In the past year, the Meme coin issuance platform Launchpad market on the Solana chain has experienced explosive growth, quickly forming a highly competitive landscape. Pump.fun, as one of the earliest emerging platforms, is seen as a catalyst for the prosperity of Solana's "on-chain casino." The platform allows any user to issue tokens without barriers, adopting bonding curve pricing and pioneering a fair issuance model without pre-sales or team shares.

With the advantages of low cost and high-speed transactions on Solana, Pump.fun ignited a meme coin frenzy in 2024. In just 13 months, platform users issued over 8 million tokens. At its peak on October 24, 2024, the platform produced more than 36,000 tokens in a single day, averaging 25 new tokens every minute. This unprecedented scale of token creation allowed Pump.fun to dominate the market, earning Solana the title of the largest "casino" on-chain. However, Pump.fun's success also brought concerns. On one hand, a large number of low-quality projects emerged, with a graduation rate of less than 1%, and the vast majority of tokens were short-lived. On the other hand, while the platform was highly profitable, users generally suffered losses; statistics show that nearly 90% of users lost their principal or made less than $100 in meme coin trading, while the platform earned about $98 million in just six months.

By the end of 2024, Pump.fun's official revenue exceeded $223 million (approximately 1.15 million SOL), and it continued to cash out its SOL earnings. In just a year and a half, the platform's fee account sold about 3.403 million SOL (approximately $629 million), becoming the second-largest source of selling pressure after Solana's early investors FTX/Alameda. Such a massive outflow of funds raised concerns within the community about the platform's sustainability and ecological impact. Faced with Pump.fun's dominance, market participants quickly took action, leading the entire Meme Launchpad sector into a heated competition. Within the Solana ecosystem, the established decentralized exchange Raydium launched LaunchLab to compete with Pump.fun; the popular meme coin BONK opened the LetsBonk.fun launchpad; and the on-chain aggregator Jupiter also attempted to launch similar services.

Daily token deployment situation, data from @adam_tehc's DUNE

Challenges for Pump.fun

As a pioneer in the one-click launch platform for meme coins, Pump.fun established a basic operational model. Users only need to fill in basic information such as token name and symbol, and can automatically deploy token contracts and establish trading pools without programming skills, significantly lowering the barrier to issuing tokens. The platform employs various bonding curve pricing models to balance initial prices and market demand, allowing issued tokens to be traded immediately in the platform's AMM pool without the need for prior liquidity injection.

The platform innovatively introduced an LP share destruction mechanism. When a new coin reaches a specific market cap threshold, a portion of the liquidity is automatically injected into the Raydium trading pool, and the corresponding LP tokens are destroyed, ensuring that project parties cannot withdraw liquidity and enhancing liquidity security.

With the "no-code token issuance, instant trading" experience, Pump.fun rapidly gained popularity in 2024, spawning a large number of creative meme tokens, some of which saw hundredfold or even thousandfold increases, attracting many speculators. The platform became one of the most profitable on-chain applications in 2024 by extracting trading fees.

However, as development progressed, Pump.fun's problems gradually became apparent: of the over 8 million issued tokens, less than 1% successfully "graduated" to external liquidity pools; user profits became severely polarized, forming a zero-sum game; the platform monetized transaction fees and continued to sell SOL, putting selling pressure on the Solana network; and the completely anonymous and unregulated model, while in line with the spirit of crypto, brought regulatory and trust risks. Consequently, Pump.fun's growth rate slowed in early 2025, with daily trading volume dropping from a peak of $544 million in January to $270 million in February, a decline of nearly 50%.

Pump.fun's token graduation rate has shown a continuous downward trend weekly

The Wheel War of LaunchPad ------ LaunchLab, Boop, Believe

LaunchLab's On-chain Degen Strategy

Raydium LaunchLab is one of the most direct competitors to Pump.fun in the Solana ecosystem. Raydium itself is an important AMM protocol on Solana, which benefited early on from Pump.fun projects contributing 41% of its swap fee revenue. However, as Pump.fun established itself with PumpSwap, Raydium's traffic and trading volume were significantly impacted.

In March 2025, Raydium launched LaunchLab, seen as a direct counterattack to Pump.fun. The overall mechanism of the platform is highly similar to Pump.fun, both supporting one-click token issuance and curve pricing, but with targeted optimizations in details.

It supports multiple pricing curves, allowing project parties to choose linear, logarithmic, or exponential models based on token positioning; it sets a lower trading fee rate of only 1%, lower than Pump.fun's 2%, and has no additional migration fees; the graduation threshold has also been lowered, requiring only 85 SOL (approximately $11,000) to transfer to the Raydium AMM pool; at the same time, it introduces a creator revenue-sharing mechanism, allowing founders of graduated tokens to continue receiving 10% of the fee revenue; the platform has also strengthened ecological integration, including repurchasing the platform token RAY with fees, supporting LP lock-up, and introducing pricing diversity.

On the day of the announcement, RAY token surged 14%, and the market had high expectations for Raydium LaunchLab. Although the official statement indicated that LaunchLab was "providing an alternative option," it has successfully attracted some projects to shift, weakening Pump.fun's dominance.

Additionally, platforms such as LetsBonk.fun, launched in collaboration with the BONK community, as well as Meteora, Boop, Genesis Launches, and others are also striving to break through, pushing the entire Launchpad market into a phase of full competition.

LaunchLab's daily active user growth is rapid

A Different Approach by Believe: Productizing Creative Narratives

As the Meme Launchpad sector becomes increasingly crowded, the "rebirth" of the Believe project has attracted widespread attention in the industry.

Founded by Australian entrepreneur Ben Pasternak, Believe was formerly a social token platform called Clout. Ben had created several hit applications 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 the upgraded platform Believe, shifting the concept from "Believe in Someone" to "Believe in Something," emphasizing the value belief in creativity and ideas, marking a strategic transformation of the platform from social asset trading to a creative incubation factory.

Ben himself commented on this transformation, saying, "This is a shift from influence to trust. We no longer hype celebrities but look for meaningful projects."

Believe adopts a unique product mechanism, using the social platform as an entry point for token issuance, achieving a seamless connection between Web2 and Web3. Users only need to @LaunchACoin on the X platform and attach the token name, and the system will automatically create the token using Meteora's joint curve, without needing to log into a DApp or fill out forms. This "discussion equals token issuance" interaction model allows any valuable idea to be immediately converted into a token, significantly lowering the participation barrier. The platform also established a "B point" mechanism, where when the token's fee revenue reaches a critical value, the founder can withdraw funds to support the project; if the target is not met, it is considered a market rejection. Although the B point is not a hard numerical threshold, its underlying logic is similar to a Kickstarter-style crowdfunding mechanism: "transaction heat equals market vote."

Imran Khan, founding partner of Alliance DAO, commented, "Founders or Scouts mark @LaunchACoin, and a token is born. The market will assign value based on the importance of the problem this idea aims to solve," in short, market heat determines the fate of the project.

In terms of revenue structure, Believe has also implemented a series of innovative designs. Each transaction incurs a 2% fee, and unlike other LaunchPads, its tokens still have a 2% trading tax for both buying and selling within the contract after launch, but the distribution structure is highly incentive-oriented: 1% goes to the token creator (founder), 0.1% rewards the Scout (the user who first discovered or promoted the token), and the remaining 0.9% is retained by the platform. This mechanism not only provides immediate revenue assurance for creators but also incorporates "token discoverers" into the revenue-sharing system for the first time, greatly incentivizing the community to actively discover and spread quality ideas.

Since its launch, Believe has recorded a total transaction 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 fee income in the past 24 hours was approximately $10 million

While opening up token issuance, Believe also attempts to govern the platform's order to avoid becoming a dumping ground for junk coins.

In terms of creator incentives, Believe's mechanism is to choose to share with issuers, returning 1% of each transaction directly to creators; there are no reserved holdings or token ratio controls, allowing founders to freely define distributions; a Scout incentive mechanism is established to promote decentralized content discovery; the platform actively displays data such as transaction volume and creator income to enhance transparency. The participation of some Web2 entrepreneurs has also enhanced Believe's meta quality, with RizzGPT developer Alex Leiman and well-known hacker Ruben Norte issuing personal tokens on the platform, with project market caps once soaring to millions of dollars, pushing Believe's image from a pure meme playground towards a "creative value testing ground."

This narrative logic was particularly evident in the LaunchCoin incident. The token was originally issued by Ben as PASTERNAK, but was renamed LaunchCoin upon the platform's launch and given functional significance. LaunchCoin surged 200 times on the day of its launch, with a market cap exceeding $200 million, sparking intense community discussion.

Some users viewed it as a sign that the platform had officially entered the governance token stage; others questioned whether Ben was using his founder status for arbitrage. Ultimately, Ben sold off most of his holdings in batches, profiting about $1.3 million. The fate of LaunchCoin sparked heated debates in the community around the core theme of "trust." Whether supporters or skeptics, this incident successfully brought Believe's brand positioning back to the discussion center and validated the attention on its main value direction.

The trust narrative emphasizes the value behind creativity, no longer simply encouraging foolish speculation, attracting more rational builders and entrepreneurs, while the interest-binding mechanism ensures that creators, Scouts, and the platform all have revenue mechanisms, binding participants economically and continuously incentivizing quality content. Under this mechanism, although many Web2 talents are currently launching tokens with products, the real feedback from community participation is that after the tokens go live, robots acquire most of the chips, and due to the high tax initially, there are fewer sell orders. Quality projects quickly reach market caps exceeding $5-10 million, and as trading taxes decrease, robots holding large amounts of chips will sell off in large quantities, leading to many tokens rising to hundreds of thousands or even millions in market cap, but their sustainability is not very good. Some in the community believe this is good for entrepreneurs, Scouts, and the platform, but these are all paid for by retail investors.

Ben hopes to seek a dynamic balance between "empowering real value projects" and "curbing blind speculative bubbles" through Believe. Although there is still debate about whether it can truly last long, at the current stage, Believe has successfully established a differentiated label in the Meme Launchpad battle through mechanism innovation, topical events, and explosive data.

Key Differences Among Leading Platforms

After experiencing Pump.fun's dominance and the follow-up imitation by various platforms, the current Meme Launchpad market has formed several leading camps. Below is a horizontal comparison of Pump.fun, Raydium LaunchLab, Boop, and Believe across key dimensions.

Issuance Methods and Barriers

Pump.fun, LaunchLab, and SunPump all adopt a DApp page-style one-click token issuance, requiring users to log in and fill in relevant token information to complete the deployment process. Believe, on the other hand, completely breaks out of the DApp paradigm, triggering token issuance through Twitter social links, without needing to enter the platform page.

In terms of barriers, Boop, Pump.fun, and LaunchLab have almost no requirements for issuers, allowing any user to issue tokens at any time. Believe appears to have zero barriers, but in reality, it forms a kind of "natural selection" through social relationship networks, with followers of entrepreneurs like Ben and Alex becoming the first creators and participants.

Regarding the "graduation threshold," Pump.fun initially set it at a market cap of $69,000; LaunchLab's initial setting is 85 SOL (approximately $11,000), but it can set a minimum launch mode of 30 SOL, making the barrier lower; while Believe does not set a fixed threshold, it judges whether the idea is accepted by the market based on "B point" trading fee revenue.

Fee Structure and Distribution Mechanism

Pump.fun charges a 2% transaction fee, initially all going to the platform, but starting in May 2025, it began returning 50% to creators; LaunchLab's transaction fee rate is 1%, with 25% used to repurchase the platform token RAY, and founders can additionally apply to receive up to 10%; Believe charges a 2% transaction fee embedded within the token contract, with 1% going to creators, 0.1% to Scouts, and 0.9% retained by the platform. From the data, Believe offers the highest revenue-sharing ratio to creators among all platforms, while also pioneering Scout revenue-sharing incentives, allowing discoverers to continue benefiting.

Community Participation and Governance

Pump.fun follows extreme libertarianism, with no review or governance mechanism, relying on spontaneous community organization for hot topic dissemination, but this also makes it susceptible to manipulation by large players, leading to retail investors "losing more and winning less."

Raydium LaunchLab leverages its AMM background, binding DeFi community resources, and facilitating internal circulation through platform token incentives; Boop relies on Dingaling's previous influence in the community.

Believe attempts to incorporate community consensus decision-making elements into governance. Through token-holder governance, Snapshot voting, and other methods, discussions are held on whether tokens should enter DEX liquidity pools, whether to support promotion, etc., forming a preliminary framework of "governance upon issuance." If matured 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 returns 1% of transaction fees upon issuance, combined with the Scout reward mechanism, creating a flywheel effect of issuance → user acquisition → re-issuance.

LaunchLab retains creators through low barriers, high freedom, and RAY repurchase, while Pump.fun has lost some attractiveness in the new environment due to a lack of early incentive mechanisms.

Market Outlook for LaunchPad

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

Data Frenzy Retreats, Fine-grained Competition Begins

On-chain data shows that the frenzy for meme coin issuance is receding. For example, Pump.fun's daily trading volume and daily token issuance have significantly declined in early 2025, making the "get-rich-quick" myth difficult to replicate on a large scale.

This indicates that the phase of barbaric growth is coming to an end, and competition among platforms will shift to fine-grained operations. Those who can continuously create hit products, improve creator yield, and enhance user trading experience will take the initiative before the next wave of enthusiasm. The data showing Pump.fun users voting with their feet (trading volume halved) also indicates that if the platform cannot improve the profit and loss structure and emotional experience of participants, even first-mover advantages will gradually be eroded.

Business Models Shift from "Harvesting" to "Win-Win"

Pump.fun's early profit model was simple and brutal: the platform collected fees, while users had a very low chance of winning, forming a one-sided structure of "platform wins, users lose." In contrast, new platforms represented by Believe and LaunchLab generally adopt a growth strategy that benefits creators and the community.

For example, Believe directly returns 1% of the fee to founders, encouraging creators to continue producing content; LaunchLab builds a more internally growing ecological loop through fee sharing and RAY repurchase. Future Launchpads will emphasize a win-win situation for platforms, creators, and users, forming a true "content incentive network."

Pump.fun's recent introduction of a creator revenue-sharing mechanism can also be seen as a push for this new model against old players.

Multi-chain Landscape Becomes the Norm, Each Ecosystem Explores Its Meme Soil

As competition among Solana-based platforms (Pump.fun, LaunchLab, BONK) heats up, other public chains are also accelerating the deployment of their own Meme Launchpads: Tron’s SunPump, Solana’s Boop, Base’s Genesis Launches, and even projects from the ICP and Avalanche ecosystems are starting to test the waters.

Essentially, meme coin issuance platforms have become powerful tools for public chains to compete for active users. Meme coins, due to their low barriers and strong topical attributes, are naturally suitable for building on-chain traffic.

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

Community Culture and Narrative Building Will Become the Platform's Moat

The core of memes lies not in technology, but in narrative. The platforms themselves are no exception:

Pump.fun started with "extreme freedom, absolute openness," but thus fell into issues of large players running rampant and poor-quality projects;

Raydium emphasizes "fair launches, technical optimization," shaping an "Avenger" image to attract native users back;

Boop focuses on the value recovery of the core token by leveraging the personal brand "Dingaling" and $Boop's ecological feedback;

Believe follows the "trust and value" route, attempting to attract the Builder community and positioning creativity as the source of memes.

In the future, community culture will directly determine what type of user groups the platform attracts: whether they lean towards Degen (pure speculation), KOL (influencer-driven), Builder (value-oriented), or general users (primarily for entertainment). The platform's differentiated positioning will extend beyond product mechanisms to emotional consensus and cultural atmosphere.

From the daily token deployment ratio, Pump.fun's market share has shifted from significant monopoly to 57%

From Meme to ICM, New Entrepreneurial Incubation Paths Emerge

Although currently 99% of meme coins are still short-term speculative products, some projects have begun to attempt "moving from meme to product." Some founders use transaction fees to establish initial funding pools, starting to build teams and develop prototypes; some platforms, like Believe, encourage founders to fulfill their Roadmap through a mechanism of "releasing startup funds after reaching B points."

Communities have begun to observe and govern certain tokens over the long term, such as LaunchCoin, which has experimental value in governance, revenue sharing, and functional expansion. If a small number of meme projects successfully incubate into actual products through Launchpad in the future, their "symbolic" significance will have a profound impact on the entire industry: it will prove that Launchpads can not only incubate speculative coins but also nurture Web3 projects. At that time, Launchpads will no longer be "issuance tools," but rather "project cold-start infrastructure."

Conclusion

Meme Launchpad is standing at the critical point of transitioning from barbaric explosion to fine-grained operation. The dominance of Pump.fun has been broken, and platforms like Raydium LaunchLab and Believe have entered the market with differentiated strategies, gradually capturing user and creator shares.

In the future, the winner of the industry will not necessarily be the one with the lowest fees, but rather the one that can build a content flywheel, community consensus, and platform trust mechanism. Currently, Believe has begun to establish its differentiated moat through social distribution models, Scout incentive mechanisms, and governance exploration, demonstrating strong iterative and growth potential. Of course, this is still a marathon-style competition. The platform that truly stands out will need to achieve a balance across multiple dimensions of "cultural identity, creator win-win, ecological governance, and safety compliance."

As Ben Pasternak said, "We are not just building a platform; we hope to give every good idea a possibility of monetization." This may very well be the most credible direction for the next phase of Meme Launchpad.