On the early morning of April 26th, Solana's well-known Meme coin BONK announced the launch of its own LaunchPad — LetsBonk.fun, and the market enthusiastically echoed "LetsBONK!" Within a short 24 hours, it created 800,000 visitors, $3 billion in transaction volume, 2700 tokens created, with over 70 successfully launched. The namesake token Let's BONK surged to a $30 million market cap within 6 hours, internet-famous cat Hosico also reached a $30 million market cap, and BONK community OGs each led their own concept tokens to blossom.

With so many projects launching LaunchPads, why was BONK able to generate such tremendous energy? After the initial climax, is BONK a flash in the pan or will it continue to rise?

The Position of BONK in the Solana Ecosystem

When mentioning BONK, many people's first impression is the "yellow Shiba Inu logo," and the second impression is the "Saga smartphone airdrop." If we trace back, this yellow Shiba Inu was the first contributor to Solana's smartphone sales. At the time Solana launched the Solana phone, the goal was to create an ecosystem. The first step was to release the phone, but the focus was on creating a crypto-first app store, allowing crypto participants to break free from the Apple and Google ecosystems.

However, initially, the phone's sales were only 20-30 units per day, even after promotion, sales only reached 50-60 units. Selling 20,000 phones might have taken several years. When Toly participated in Laura Shin's podcast, he admitted that they had only sold 2500 Saga phones. However, just three days later, within one day, they sold 15,000 phones. By then, the Saga airdrop of BONK was already several times the phone's price. Through the BONK airdrop, a new model was established, connecting physical products and the ecosystem through a Memecoin.

In an interview with Bankless, Toly expressed, "I believe Solana developers and NFT developers are two different groups, with some overlap, but clearly two different types of developers. BONK has connected the two, turning phones into NFTs, and BONK holders have to pay attention to the phone app ecosystem."

Two years have passed in the blink of an eye, and BONK has been continuously building in the Solana ecosystem for two years, whether in DeFi, GameFi, developer community, or application introduction, actively participating. Over 10 applications have been established and $BONK has been integrated into over 100 ecosystems. And when the Solana ecosystem needed to kick off a LaunchPad battle, there he came with LetsBonk.fun once again.

LetsBONK!

LaunchPad Mechanism

Hours after BONK officially announced its READ strategy focusing on "Reduce Supply, Expand Awareness, Accelerate Adoption, Drive Revenue," BONK launched LetsBONK.Fun, embodying the "Accelerate Adoption" pillar. The statement "It's not enough to talk about $BONK, it needs to be used" was also put into action.

The BONK platform has a 1% transaction fee, a portion of which is used for validation by BONKSOL's nodes, and another portion is used for buyback and burn of $BONK, thereby achieving "Reduce Supply." Upon its launch, the platform received support from numerous projects within the Solana ecosystem and the OG community, including Dex leader Jupiter, crypto "Paypal" MoonPay, OG community MonkeDAO "SMB community," Solana founder Toly, and other key figures in the circle who sent their congratulations to LetsBonk.

What Coins Does LetsBONK Have?

DUMPFUN

In the first few hours of the LaunchPad release, three tokens emerged in a tripartite balance of power. The first token deployed was DumpFun, which soared to a $6 million market cap within three hours due to its first-mover advantage. However, as other tokens gained strength, the inherently unsuitable ticker fell behind and dwindled to a market cap of $80,000 by now.

LETSBONK

LetsBONK is the Meme named after the LetsBonk.fun platform. While it didn't start with a particularly high market cap, it was recognized in the market as a dark horse. After reaching a peak market cap of $500,000 in the first wave, LetsBONK was briefly back to a $100,000 market cap as the trending DumpFun absorbed value. However, with DumpFun's weakening candlestick pattern and increasing support from KOLs, project teams, and community OGs chanting the slogan "LetsBonk," the market's attention returned to $LETSBONK. It opened low and surged high, skyrocketing to a $30 million market cap within 6 hours. This was also the first "100x coin" LetsBONK.fun minted post-launch, now retraced to a $10 million market cap at the time of writing.

HOSICO

Hosico, originally a cute cat with 1.8 million followers on Instagram, issued on BONK as Hosico in the Studio Ghibli AI style, made a surprise move after 4 a.m., skyrocketing to a $10 million market cap within an hour. Unaffected by other token movements, it established an independent market on the BONK platform, reaching a peak market cap of $23 million and currently sitting at $10 million.

NOM

NOM is the founder of the OG MonkeDAO community and the fitness app MoonWalk, as well as a core member/initiator of BONK. He is widely praised by the community. After a rollercoaster ride from a high of $5 million to a low of $900,000 in market cap, NOM himself tweeted thanking $NOM participants and expressing consideration for the token's future application. The token price then skyrocketed to a $3.5 million market cap, currently priced back at $1.5 million. Like LetsBONK, it also has a "community slogan" — "Trust in Nom."

PumpFun Against the World

As of only a year and a half by April, PumpFun has sold a total of 3.403 million Sol tokens (approximately $629 million), becoming the second largest seller apart from Solana's former backer FTX/Alameda. Before the Pump AMM emerged, it was just a source of anguish for the Solana Foundation and retail investors, but after establishing its own DEX, its ambition to dominate the upstream and downstream aspects became evident. The DEX has become tense, and thus, "the world has been suffering from PumpFun for a long time," permeating all aspects of the ecosystem.

Even so, despite Jupiter, Raydium, Meteora, Virtuals, and dozens of other large and small projects launching their LaunchPads in succession, the responses were lackluster. Faced with so many business competitors, PumpFun boasts a terrifying market share in LaunchPads and the frequency of unloading Sol, exuding an air of "you dislike me, but you can't defeat me."

Meteora once attempted something similar to Raydium's current strategy by proposing an SDK, trying to gradually erode PumpFun's market share through a brute-force approach. However, this attempt was unsuccessful, and the results were not significant. Raydium, on the other hand, seems to have a deeper understanding of on-chain Degen behavior. As a former "good partner" of PumpFun, after PumpFun decided in February to no longer launch its token on Raydium, Raydium lost a significant portion of its transaction fee revenue.

Two months later, they were well prepared. They first sent out cook.meme to probe the market. After "Cooking" two meme coins with a market value in the tens of millions, "Time" and "Symmetra" lost their market momentum. The market then remained calm for a period until they reignited it through LetsBONK. Interestingly, the promotional image used by cook.meme featured BONK's logo as the first item.

Promotional Image from cook.meme's Launch

Today, Raydium's LaunchLab has integrated six platforms and initiated trading reward tasks to incentivize users to trade directly on Raydium. The LaunchLab has shown initial success in terms of trading volume, but further developments require continuous monitoring.

The LaunchPad and DEX markets have now formed a tripartite balance of power, with everyone vying for this lucrative opportunity. Raydium appears to be planning to confront PumpFun's "single-brand" monopoly model through a "multi-brand" wheel-to-wheel battle. The outcome is still unknown, and hopefully, more retail investors can benefit from this battle, bringing liquidity back to the market. However, in the current market conditions, "cash is king." We hope all readers will practice good fund management when seeking opportunities in the market.

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