Raydium is launching its own version of pump.fun

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.

---

The Solana DEX and automated market maker Raydium is launching a token launchpad that will initially resemble a direct fork of pump.fun, Blockworks has learned exclusively.

The release of the platform, which is named LaunchLab, comes less than a month after news broke that the wildly popular Solana memecoin launchpad pump.fun was developing an AMM of its own, essentially severing an unofficial partnership it had struck with Raydium. LaunchLab will offer linear, exponential and logarithmic bonding curves that match demand and price for a token. It will also let third party UIs set their own fees.

Pump.fun tokens that reach a market cap of $69,000 have some liquidity deposited into a Raydium trading pool and burned. Pump.fun memecoins made up 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 a major drawdown in Raydium revenue once pump.fun begins migrating tokens to pump’s in-house AMM. 

Even after the flash crash, Raydium still holds some $168 million on its balance sheet, per Blockworks Research. The nice thing about having a big war chest is it allows a company to move quickly on things like suddenly building a pump.fun fork — though for what it’s worth, pump.fun’s in-house AMM had bounced around the Solana rumor mill for some time before the news leaked.

Anonymous Raydium core contributor Infra told me the protocol began developing LaunchLab “several months ago” but kept the project shelved because it “didn’t want teams to feel Raydium was competing with them directly.” That magnanimity appears to have dried up after pump.fun’s AMM plans emerged.

Raydium believes pump.fun found product-market fit partly because of Raydium’s infrastructure, Infra told me. But although they think Raydium’s liquidity pools could be a draw for users, Infra didn’t cast LaunchLab as a pump.fun killer.

“LaunchLab isn’t about replacing Pump or any other platform — it’s an alternative for teams who don’t want to develop their own programs from scratch, and for Pump users who prefer Raydium’s AMM v4 for pool migrations,” Infra wrote in a text message.

Besides offering novel bonding curves and flexible fees, LaunchLab will also support multiple quote tokens besides SOL and will integrate with Raydium’s liquidity provider locker, which lets issuers secure swap fees for tokens in perpetuity. LaunchLab is the first piece of a broader “suite of tools” that Raydium is pushing out for token creation, Infra said.

---

Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

• Blockworks Daily: The newsletter that helps thousands of investors understand crypto and the markets, by Byron Gilliam.
• Empire: Start your morning with the top news and analysis to inform your day in crypto.
• Forward Guidance: Reporting and analysis on the growing intersection of crypto and macroeconomics, policy and finance.
• 0xResearch: Alpha directly in your inbox. Market highlights, data, degen trade ideas, governance updates, token performance and more.
• Lightspeed: Built for Solana investors, developers and community members. The latest from one of crypto’s hottest networks.
• The Drop: For crypto collectors and traders, covering apps, games, memes and more.

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.