Can Raydium's LaunchLab Reshape the Solana Ecosystem?

In the Solana ecosystem, Raydium, as a leading decentralized exchange, is in fierce competition with the largest token issuance platform, Pump Fun. Although their business focuses are different, both are striving to capture more market share and revenue.

The daily trading volume of PumpSwap launched by Pump Fun has recently stabilized at around $400 million, approaching Raydium's $600 million. Notably, Pump Fun has contributed up to 41% of the automated market maker (AMM) revenue for Raydium in the past month. However, with the launch of PumpSwap, Raydium's traffic has significantly decreased, prompting Raydium to launch LaunchLab to "regain liquidity dominance."

LaunchLab Overview

Raydium's LaunchLab is essentially a "no-code token issuance tool + automatic liquidity migration service", offering two main usage modes:

1. JustSendIt Mode: Users can create tokens with one click, preset to raise 85 SOL, and upon success, automatically migrate to Raydium's AMM, locking liquidity.

2. LaunchLab Pro mode: Allows customization of total supply, minimum fundraising amount (starting from 30 SOL), bonding curve slope, vesting conditions, and whether to enable AMM profit sharing (up to 10% of transaction fees refunded to the project team).

In terms of the fee structure, Raydium charges a unified base fee of 1%, of which 50% goes to the "community pool", 25% is used for RAY token buybacks, and 25% is allocated for infrastructure and operational funding.

LaunchLab also supports third-party access to its backend services, allowing for the establishment of independent token issuance frontends. Among them, the most noteworthy is cook.meme, a platform focused on meme token issuance, featuring zero fees, instant transactions, and a simple UI. It is somewhat similar to a UI copy of Pump Fun, but the underlying liquidity is bound to Raydium.

Raydium adopts this open model not only to attract traffic but also to replicate the content and ecosystem built by the community front-end through Pump Fun.

Projects worth paying attention to

The launch of LaunchLab directly benefits the RAY token (25% of the fees are used for buybacks). Since the announcement of LaunchLab, the price of RAY has increased by about 8%. If LaunchLab can maintain its popularity, the buyback strength of RAY will be enhanced, potentially driving the price further up.

The vitality of the LaunchPad platform depends on whether it can generate enough "Golden Dog" projects. When the platform continually demonstrates wealth creation effects, user assets will naturally concentrate on that platform, forming a positive cycle.

Within 24 hours of the LaunchLab going live, only the market capitalization of the $TIME token exceeded $1 million. Other tokens such as $ARUA and $Gaydium saw a surge in market capitalization initially, but ultimately market forces determined that only a single token could maintain a high market capitalization.

The characteristics of $TIME, $ARUA, and $Gaydium are as follows:

• $TIME is the first meme coin created on the cook.meme platform.
• $ARUA is a token issued by Raydium. Although it was deployed earlier, it was launched later.
• In addition to the pun on its name, $Gaydium also drew attention because the Raydium developers once posted its contract address on GitHub, but quickly deleted it, leading to a crash in the token price.

Market performance of $TIME:

• Current Market Cap: $6 million
• Highest Market Cap: 8.5 million USD
• 24-hour trading volume: 30.2 million USD
• Number of holders: 7,600

Summary

Although Raydium's LaunchLab seems to be a delayed counterattack against Pump Fun, its design specifically addresses the advantages of Pump Fun. LaunchLab not only offers a customized token issuance model but also expands its influence through open frontend strategies like cook.meme, aiming to redirect traffic, fees, and market narratives back to the Raydium ecosystem.

Whether LaunchLab can truly achieve wealth creation effects and reignite the meme token craze mainly depends on three key factors:

1. Can it hatch enough strong popular projects;
2. Are the fees and liquidity design friendly to retail investors?
3. Can the ecosystem quickly gather front-end tools to create a network effect.

Currently, there is still room for improvement in these three aspects. However, considering that LaunchLab has been launched for less than a month, it is too early to determine its success or failure. The cryptocurrency market is ever-changing, and perhaps the next hundredfold meme token will be born on the LaunchLab platform. Let us wait and see.