Raydium presents LaunchLab: a new alternative to pump.fun for the launch of memecoin on Solana
Raydium, the number one DEX on Solana, has announced the launch of LaunchLab, a new launchpad for memecoin. The project represents a direct alternative to pump.fun, another popular platform for launching memecoin on Solana. LaunchLab: a strategic alternative to pump.fun by Raydium The launch of LaunchLab comes at an important time, less than a month after the news that pump.fun was developing its own internal AMM, ending what had been an unofficial collaboration with Raydium. According to information from Blockworks, LaunchLab will initially operate as a direct fork of pump.fun, offering three different bonding curves (linear, exponential, and logarithmic) to align the price with the demand for a token. Additionally, the platform will allow third-party user interfaces to set their own fees. This news comes in a context where pump.fun had played a key role in Raydium’s revenues. In fact, according to data from Blockworks Research, the memecoins generated on pump.fun accounted for 41% of Raydium’s swap fees in the last 30 days. New opportunities for Raydium and the memecoin market One of the most significant aspects of the pump.fun model concerns the maturation process of its tokens. When a memecoin reaches a market capitalization of 69,000 dollars, a portion of the liquidity is deposited into a trading pool on Raydium and subsequently burned. However, the transition of pump.fun towards an independent AMM had generated concern among Raydium investors. This was reflected in a 25% drop in the price of Raydium’s native token in February. Market operators indeed feared a significant decline in revenue when pump.fun would start moving its tokens away from Raydium. Despite this decline, the platform maintains a solid financial reserve of 168 million dollars, according to Blockworks Research. This financial availability has likely allowed Raydium to react quickly, developing an autonomous alternative like LaunchLab. LaunchLab: a development already planned for months According to Infra, an anonymous member of the Raydium development team, LaunchLab was actually in development for several months, but the project was temporarily shelved to avoid creating direct competition with other platforms. However, the decision of pump.fun to develop an independent AMM led Raydium to change strategy quickly, accelerating the release of its own product. Despite this situation, the Raydium team does not consider LaunchLab as a “rival” of pump.fun, but rather as an alternative solution for those who do not want to develop everything from scratch. In detail, LaunchLab is aimed at: Projects that prefer to use the Raydium infrastructure for liquidity pools Users of pump.fun who might find advantages in the AMM v4 of Raydium for the migration of the poolsInnovative features of LaunchLab, the new launchpad for memecoin by Raydium Unlike other similar platforms, LaunchLab will offer additional options for token creators: Support for multiple reference assets in addition to SOL Integration with Raydium Liquidity Provider Locker, a feature that allows issuers to lock the deposited liquidity, reducing the chances of a rug pull Boning Curve innovative to better manage the relationship between demand and priceAccording to Infra, LaunchLab represents only the first step of a broader initiative. The Raydium team is indeed preparing a whole suite of tools to facilitate the creation of tokens on Solana. Conclusion The entry of Raydium into the memecoin launchpad sector with LaunchLab marks a significant change in the Solana ecosystem. On one hand, Raydium seeks to offer a strategic alternative to pump.fun, on the other hand, it is clear that the sector is experiencing a significant evolution, with more and more platforms ready to innovate and compete to offer better solutions to users. It remains to be seen how the market will react to this new proposal and if LaunchLab will succeed in capturing a significant portion of the users currently tied to pump.fun.