Over the past year, the Meme coin issuance platform Launchpad market on the Solana blockchain has experienced explosive growth, rapidly forming a highly competitive landscape. As one of the earliest platforms to rise, Pump.fun is seen as the catalyst for the thriving Solana "on-chain casino." This platform allows any user to issue tokens with no barriers, using a bonding curve pricing mechanism, and pioneering a fair distribution model with no presale or team allocation.

With the advantage of Solana's low cost and high-speed transactions, Pump.fun ignited the meme coin craze in 2024. In just 13 months, platform users issued over 8 million tokens, reaching its peak on October 24, 2024, with a daily output of over 36,000 tokens, averaging 25 new tokens minted per minute. This unprecedented scale of token creation briefly dominated the market and earned Solana the title of the largest "on-chain casino." However, Pump.fun's success also raised 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 profitable, users generally incurred losses, with statistics showing that nearly 90% of users lost their principal or made less than $100 in profit from meme coin trading, while the platform generated about $98 million in revenue in just six months.

By the end of 2024, Pump.fun's official revenue had accumulated to over $223 million (approximately 1.15 million SOL), with continuous liquidation of the received SOL. In just a year and a half, the platform's fee account had sold about 3.403 million SOL (approximately $629 million), becoming the second largest source of selling pressure after FTX/Alameda, an early investor in Solana. Such a massive outflow of funds raised concerns in the community about the platform's sustainability and ecosystem impact. Faced with Pump.fun's dominant position, market participants acted swiftly, intensifying the competition in the entire Meme Launchpad race. Within the Solana ecosystem, the established decentralized exchange Raydium launched LaunchLab to counter Pump.fun; the trending meme coin BONK opened LetsBonk.fun launchpad; and the on-chain aggregator Jupiter also attempted to introduce similar services.

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

Pump.fun's Challenge

As a pioneer in meme coin one-click launch platforms, Pump.fun has established its basic operating model. Users only need to fill out basic information such as token name and symbol, without requiring programming skills to automatically deploy the token contract and set up a liquidity pool, significantly lowering the barrier to token issuance. The platform uses various bonding curve pricing models to balance the initial price and market demand. The issued tokens can be traded immediately in the platform's AMM pool without the need for pre-injected liquidity.

The platform has innovatively introduced an LP token burning mechanism. When the new token reaches a specific market cap threshold, a portion of the liquidity will automatically be injected into the Raydium trading pool, and the corresponding LP tokens will be burned to prevent the project team from rug pulling, thus enhancing liquidity security.

With the experience of "codeless token launch and instant trading," Pump.fun quickly gained popularity in 2024, giving rise to a large number of creative meme tokens, including many that saw price increases of hundreds or even thousands of times, attracting numerous speculators. By collecting transaction fees, the platform became one of the most profitable on-chain applications in 2024.

However, as Pump.fun developed, issues began to arise: out of over 8 million issued tokens, less than 1% successfully "graduated" to external liquidity pools; user rewards became highly polarized, leading to a zero-sum game; the platform converted fees into fiat and continued to sell SOL, causing selling pressure on the Solana network; the completely anonymous and unaudited model, while in line with the crypto ethos, brought regulatory and trust risks. Consequently, Pump.fun's growth slowed in early 2025, with daily trading volume dropping from a peak of $544 million in January to $270 million in February, a nearly 50% decrease.

The graduation rate of Pumpfun's token has been on a weekly downtrend

The LaunchPad Battle: LaunchLab, Boop, Believe

LaunchLab's On-Chain Degen Strategy

Raydium's LaunchLab is one of Pump.fun's direct competitors in the Solana ecosystem. Raydium itself is a significant AMM protocol on Solana, which earlier benefited from the 41% of swap fee revenue contributed by the Pump.fun project. However, with Pump.fun launching PumpSwap as a standalone platform, Raydium's traffic and trading volume were significantly impacted.

In March 2025, Raydium introduced LaunchLab, seen as a direct retaliation against Pump.fun. The platform's overall mechanism is highly similar to Pump.fun, both supporting one-click token launches and curve pricing, but with targeted optimizations in detail.

It supports multiple pricing curves, allowing project teams to choose linear, logarithmic, or exponential models based on token positioning; sets a lower transaction fee of only 1%, below Pump.fun's 2%, with no additional migration costs; lowers the graduation threshold to just 85 SOL raised (approximately $11,000), which can then be transferred to the Raydium AMM pool; introduces a creator revenue-sharing mechanism, where the founders of graduated tokens can continue to receive a 10% fee share; the platform also enhances ecosystem integration, including fee buybacks with platform token RAY, supporting LP staking, and introducing innovative designs like pricing diversity.

On the day of the announcement, RAY coin surged by 14%, as the market placed high hopes on Raydium LaunchLab. While the official statement portrayed LaunchLab as providing an "alternative option," it has actually successfully attracted some projects to shift, weakening Pump.fun's dominance.

Furthermore, various platforms such as LetsBonk.fun, launched in collaboration with the BONK community, as well as Meteora, Boop, Genesis Launches, and others, are vigorously breaking through, propelling the entire Launchpad market into a phase of intense competition.

LaunchLab's daily active users are rapidly growing

The Unconventional Approach of Believe, a Creative Narrative Productization Concept

Amid the increasingly crowded Meme Launchpad race, the "rebirth" of the Believe project has garnered widespread industry attention.

Founded by Australian entrepreneur Ben Pasternak, Believe, formerly a social token platform called Clout, is making a comeback with an upgraded platform emphasizing a shift from "Believe in Someone" to "Believe in Something." Ben, known for creating several successful apps and monetizing them, saw Clout quickly fade due to its excessive reliance on celebrity effects. By the end of April 2025, Ben reintroduced the platform as Believe, marking a strategic transformation from a social asset trading platform to a creative incubator, focusing on the value belief in creativity and ideas.

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

Believe adopts a unique product mechanism, using a social platform as the token issuance gateway to achieve seamless integration between Web2 and Web3. Users simply need to mention the token name on Platform X @LaunchACoin, and the system automatically creates the token using Meteora's bonding curve, without the need to log in to a DApp or fill out a form. This "discuss and mint" interaction model enables any valuable idea to be instantly transformed into a token, significantly lowering the entry barrier. The platform also establishes a "B Point" mechanism where founders can withdraw funds to support projects when token fee revenues reach a threshold; otherwise, it is considered a market veto. Although the B Point is not a fixed numerical threshold, its logic is similar to a Kickstarter-style crowdfunding mechanism where "transaction heat is market voting."

Alliance DAO Founding Partner Imran Khan once commented, "The founder or Scout tag @LaunchACoin, and a token is born. The market will value it based on the importance of the problem this innovation aims to solve," in short, project destiny is determined by market hype.

In terms of the revenue structure, Believe has also implemented a series of innovative designs. A 2% fee is charged on each transaction. Unlike other LaunchPads, its token still has a 2% buy/sell transaction tax within the contract post-launch. However, its distribution structure is highly incentive-oriented: 1% is allocated to the token creator (founder), 0.1% is rewarded to the Scout (the user who first discovered or promoted the token), and the remaining 0.9% goes to platform operations. This mechanism not only provides instant revenue assurance to creators but also, for the first time, includes the "token discoverer" in the revenue-sharing system, greatly incentivizing the community to actively discover and promote high-quality innovations.

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 is approximately $10 million.

While conducting an open token issuance, Believe also attempted to govern the platform to some extent to prevent it from becoming a haven for meme coins.

Regarding creator incentives, Believe's mechanism is designed for shared issuance with the issuer, with 1% of each transaction directly returned to the creator; no reserved holdings or token ratio controls are set, and founders can define the distribution freely; a Scout incentive mechanism is established to drive decentralized content discovery; the platform actively displays transaction volume, creator income, and other data to enhance transparency. The participation of some Web2 entrepreneurs has also enhanced Believe's Meta nature, with Web2 entrepreneur Alex Leiman, developer of RizzGPT, and well-known hacker Ruben Norte all issuing personal tokens on the platform, with project valuations having soared to millions of dollars, pushing Believe's image from a purely meme-filled player realm toward a "creative value experimentation ground."

This narrative logic is particularly evident in the LaunchCoin event. The token's predecessor was PASTERNAK issued personally by Ben, which was later renamed LaunchCoin upon platform launch with added functional significance. LaunchCoin surged 200 times on the day of launch, surpassing a market cap of $2 billion, sparking intense community discussions.

Some users saw it as a sign of the platform's official entry into the governance token phase; others questioned whether Ben used his founder status to engage in arbitrage. Ultimately, Ben sold off most of his holdings in batches, making a profit of approximately $1.3 million. The fate of LaunchCoin sparked a heated debate in the community around the core theme of "trust." Whether supporters or skeptics, this controversy successfully refocused the Believe brand's positioning on the center stage of discussions and validated the level of attention to its core value proposition.

The trust narrative emphasizes the value behind the creativity, no longer simply encouraging pump-and-dump schemes but attracting a more rational set of builders and entrepreneurs. The vested interests mechanism ensures that creators, scouts, and the platform all have a profit-sharing mechanism, binding participants' economic interests and continuously incentivizing high-quality content. Despite the emergence of many Web2 talents launching tokens with products under this mechanism.

However, the real feedback from the community after participation is that when the token goes live, most of the chips are held by bots, and due to the high tax that existed at the beginning, there are fewer sell orders. Quality projects quickly reach a market cap of over $5-10 million, followed by a reduction in trading taxes. The robots with a large number of chips then begin massive sell-offs, leading to many tokens with market caps surging to hundreds of even thousands of dollars, but their sustainability is not very good. Some in the community believe it is good for entrepreneurs, scouts, and the platform, but these are all paid for by retail investors.

Ben aims to seek a dynamic balance between "empowering real value projects" and "curbing blind speculation bubbles" through Believe. Although there is still controversy in the market about whether it has truly gone the distance, at this stage, Believe has already established a differentiated label in the Meme Launchpad battle through mechanism innovation, topical events, and explosive data.

Key Differential Comparison of Top Platforms

After experiencing Pump.fun's skyrocketing success and the imitation follow-ups of various platforms, the current Meme Launchpad market has formed multiple top camps. Below is a horizontal comparison of Pump.fun, Raydium LaunchLab, Boop, and Believe on key dimensions.

Issuance Method and Threshold

Pump.fun, LaunchLab, and SunPump all use a DApp page-style one-click token issuance, where users need to log in and fill out relevant token information to complete the deployment process. Believe breaks completely out of the DApp paradigm, triggering token issuance through Twitter's social chain without the need to enter the platform page.

In terms of entry barriers, Boop, Pump.fun, and LaunchLab require almost no requirements for the issuer; any user can mint tokens at any time. While Believe seems to have no entry barriers on the surface, it actually forms a certain kind of "natural selection" through a social relationship network, focusing on a group of people following entrepreneurs like Ben and Alex, who become the first batch of creators and participants.

In terms of "graduation thresholds," Pump.fun initially set it at a market cap of $69,000; LaunchLab was initially set at 85 SOL (approximately $11,000), but can be set with a minimum launch mode of 30 SOL, making the barrier to entry lower; and Believe does not have a fixed threshold, judging the acceptance of creativity in the market based on the "B-point" transaction fee income.

Fee Structure and Distribution Mechanism

Pump.fun charges a 2% transaction fee, initially all of which goes to the platform, starting in May 2025, 50% will be returned to the creators; LaunchLab has a transaction fee rate of 1%, with 25% used to repurchase the platform token RAY, and founders can apply for an additional maximum of 10%; Believe, on the other hand, charges a 2% transaction fee embedded in the token contract, with 1% going to the creators, 0.1% to Scouts, and 0.9% retained by the platform. From the data, Believe offers the highest revenue share to creators among all platforms, while also pioneering Scout profit-sharing incentives, allowing discoverers to continue to benefit.

Community Engagement and Governance

Pump.fun follows extreme liberalism with no review or governance mechanism; the community relies on spontaneous organization for viral dissemination, but is also easily manipulated by whales, leaving retail investors "losing more and winning less."

Raydium LaunchLab leverages its AMM background, binds DeFi community resources, and conducts internal ecosystem loops 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-based governance, Snapshot voting, and other methods, discussions are held on whether the token will enter a DEX liquidity pool in the future and whether it will support promotion, forming a rudimentary framework of "issuance is governance." If matured in the future, its user community stickiness is expected to far exceed the current mainstream platforms.

Creator Economy Model

Regarding creator incentives, Believe and LaunchLab are the most attractive. Believe, based on a 1% fee return upon token issuance, combined with a Scout reward mechanism, has built a flywheel effect of minting tokens, attracting new users, and minting again.

LaunchLab retains creators through low barriers, high flexibility, and features such as RAY buyback, while Pump.fun, lacking early incentive mechanisms, has lost some of its appeal in the new environment.

Market Outlook for LaunchPad

As the Meme Launchpad market transitions from the boom period to maturity, some key trends are emerging, providing directional insights for platform competition and industry evolution.

Data Craze Subsides, Refined Competition Begins

On-chain data indicates that the frenzy of meme coin issuance is waning. Taking Pump.fun as an example, its daily trading volume and daily coin issuance decreased significantly in early 2025, making it difficult to replicate the "overnight riches" myth on a large scale.

This means that the era of rapid growth is coming to an end, and competition between platforms will shift towards refined operations. Those who can continue to create blockbusters, increase creator revenue, and improve user trading experience will take the lead before the next wave of craze. Data from Pump.fun users voting with their feet (halved transaction volume) also indicates that if a platform cannot improve participant P&L structure and emotional experience, even the first-mover advantage will gradually be eroded.

Business Model Shifts from "Harvesting" to "Win-Win"

Pump.fun's early profit model was straightforward: the platform collected fees, user gaming win rates were very low, forming a one-sided "platform wins, user loses" structure. New platforms represented by Believe and LaunchLab generally adopt a growth approach that benefits creators and the community.

For example, Believe directly refunds 1% of the fee to the founder, encouraging creators to continue producing content; LaunchLab, through fee sharing and RAY buyback, builds a more endogenously growing ecosystem loop. Future Launchpads will increasingly emphasize a triple win for the platform, 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 pressure from this new model on established players.

Multi-Chain Landscape Becomes the Norm, Each Ecosystem Mines Its Own Meme Soil

As competition heats up among Solana ecosystem platforms (Pump.fun, LaunchLab, BONK), other public chains are also deploying their own Meme Launchpads: Tron's SunPump, Solana's Boop, Base's Genesis Launches, and even projects from the ICP and Avalanche ecosystems are beginning to dip their toes.

Essentially, the Meme Coin Launchpad has become a battleground for public chains to attract active users. Due to its low barrier to entry and strong meme-driven nature, the Meme coin is inherently suitable for building on-chain traffic.

In the future, major public chains may give rise to one or two leading Meme Launchpads, deeply integrated with wallets, social media, and NFT tools, becoming key metrics of ecosystem activity and user loyalty.

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

The essence of Meme lies not in technology but in narrative. The platform itself is no exception:

Pump.fun started with the motto of "Ultimate Freedom, Absolute Openness" but fell into issues of market manipulation and poor project quality;

Raydium emphasizes "Fair Launch, Technical Optimization," shaping an "Avenger" image to attract native user engagement;

Boop leverages the personal brand "Dingaling" and ecosystem support for $Boop, focusing on the value capture of the core token;

Believe follows the "Trust and Value" path, attempting to attract a community of builders and positioning creativity as the origin of the Meme.

In the future, community culture will directly determine the platform's ability to attract different user groups: whether they lean towards Degen (pure speculation), KOL (influence-driven), Builders (value-oriented), or mainstream users (entertainment-focused). Platform differentiation will no longer be limited to product mechanisms but will extend to emotional consensus and cultural atmosphere.

In terms of daily token deployment proportion, Pumpfun's market dominance has decreased significantly from a monopoly to 57%.

From Meme to ICM, a New Entrepreneurship Incubation Path Emerges

Although 99% of Meme coins are still considered short-term speculative assets, some projects have begun to explore the transition "from Meme to product." Some founders have used fees to establish initial liquidity pools, started team building, and developed prototypes; some platforms, such as Believe, encourage founders to fulfill the roadmap by implementing mechanisms like "releasing startup funds upon reaching Point B";

The community has started to observe and govern some tokens for the long term, with LaunchCoin having experimental value in governance, revenue sharing, and feature expansion. If a small number of Meme projects successfully transition from a Launchpad to actual products in the future, their "symbolic" impact will have a profound effect on the entire industry: it proves that Launchpads can not only incubate speculative coins but also nurture Web3 project targets. At that point, the Launchpad will no longer be just an "issuance tool" but rather a "project cold-start infrastructure."

Summary

The Meme Launchpad is currently standing at the tipping point from a chaotic explosion to refined 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 market share.

The future winner in the industry may not necessarily be the one with the lowest fees, but the one that can build a content flywheel, community consensus, and platform trust mechanism. Believe is currently establishing its own differentiated moat through a social distribution model, Scout incentive mechanism, and governance exploration, demonstrating strong potential for iteration and growth. However, this is still a marathon-style competition. Platforms that truly stand out will inevitably need to achieve a balance in multiple dimensions such as "cultural identity, creator win-win, ecosystem governance, and security compliance."

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

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