Original Title: 'LetsBONK Market Cap Breaks $30 Million in 6 Hours, Raydium Counterattacks Pumpfun'

This article was first published on April 27th, with some content added during editing.

In the early morning of April 26th, BONK, a veteran meme coin on Solana, announced the launch of its own LaunchPad - LetsBonk.fun, and the market responded enthusiastically with "LetsBONK!" Within just 24 hours, it created 800,000 visitors, $300 million in trading volume, and 2,700 tokens created, with over 70 successfully launched. The eponymous token Let's BONK even skyrocketed to a $30 million market cap in just 6 hours.

Half a month later, the LetsBONK craze hasn't subsided. The number of graduated tokens in the past 24 hours has already surpassed PumpFun, especially after the founder TOM's tweet blocking the X account of PumpFun after mocking them for "copying" LetsBONK's creator incentive activity. With the participation of the returning "Believe", this Solana chain "battle of a hundred teams" has become increasingly exciting, bringing long-missed liquidity and faster volatility to the chain.

BONK's Position 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 phone airdrop". Tracing back, this yellow Shiba Inu was the first contributor to Solana phone sales. When Solana launched the Solana phone, they wanted to create an ecosystem, with the first step being the phone, but the key was to create a crypto-first app store, allowing crypto participants to not be constrained by Apple and Google's ecosystems.

Initially, phone sales were only 20-30 units per day, and even after promotion, sales only reached 50-60 units. Selling 20,000 phones could have taken years. When Toly appeared on Laura Shin's podcast, he candidly admitted to selling only 2,500 Saga phones, but just three days later, they sold 15,000 units in a single day. By then, the BONK airdrop had already multiplied the phone's price, creating a new model that connected physical products with the ecosystem through a meme coin.

Toly said in an interview with Bankless, "I think Solana's developers and NFT developers are two groups with some intersection, but clearly these are two different types of developers, and BONK connected them. The phone became an NFT, and BONK holders had to pay attention to the phone app ecosystem."

Two years have passed, and BONK has continued to build the Solana ecosystem for 2 years, actively participating in DeFi, GameFi, developer communities, and applications. It has established over 10 applications and integrated $BONK into more than 100 ecosystem systems. When the Solana ecosystem needed to launch a LaunchPad war, it came again with LetsBonk.fun.

Believe? Clout? Just Believe?

Ben Pasternak, the founder of Believe/Clout, is a 25-year-old Australian "startup genius" who entered the US App Store Top 20 with the game 'Impossible Rush' at 15, created a teenage social platform Monkey with over 20 million users at 17, and at 20 conquered Walmart shelves with plant-based chicken nuggets NUGGS.

In January this year, he appeared on the Solana chain with a product claimed to be the social version of "NASDAQ", supported by multiple Solana ecosystem OGs, and brought many Web2 tech projects to the crypto "token launch", but participants' experience was not good. Many tokens zeroed out quickly, and the mobile app crashed after being online for a while. Even tokens paid for did not arrive, and the project disappeared until recently returning with the renamed "Believe" project.

This time, he brought more Web2 talents to launch tokens in the blockchain, including Alex Leiman, another young entrepreneur whose apps RizzGPT and Astra have over 10 million total downloads. His snake game NOODLE now has a market cap of $14 million.

On the other side, tokens issued by employees from well-known AI companies are also popular in the market. GOONC, issued by OpenAI employee Pata van Goon, has broken through a $30 million market cap.

Meta software engineer RubenNorte also claims to have stepped out of his comfort zone with a project called oMSCP, which aims to go beyond the existing MCP structure. The token has now broken through a $5 million market cap.

Alex Finn independently trained a personalized AI content assistance app, Creator Buddy, which reportedly can bring massive traffic after being fed millions of X posts. Despite requiring a $50 monthly subscription, its token BUDDY has exceeded a $20 million market cap.

By creating multiple "products" with over $10 million market cap in a short time, its ecosystem's 24-hour transaction fees have exceeded $2.24 million. The founder's token "Pasternak" has also reached a market cap of $140 million, up from a previous low of $180,000. Although the process was long, the concept of "introducing outside talent" seems to be taking shape.

PumpFun Against the World

In just a year and a half until April, PumpFun has sold 3.403 million SOL (about $629 million), becoming the second-largest seller after Solana's former support institution FTX/Alameda. Before the emergence of Pump AMM, it only troubled the Solana Foundation and retail investors. After creating its own DEX, its ambition to monopolize the upstream and downstream is evident. DEXs are getting nervous, and "the world has suffered from PumpFun for a long time" has permeated every aspect of the ecosystem.

Even with Jupiter, Raydium, Meteora, Virtuals, and dozens of other projects launching LaunchPads, the response has been lukewarm. Facing so many business competitors, PumpFun's market share and SOL output frequency in LaunchPad give a "you may not like me, but you can't take me down" feeling.

Meteora once did something similar to Raydium's current strategy, proposing an SDK strategy to slowly erode PumpFun's market share through a "human wave" tactic, but without success. Raydium apparently better understands the on-chain Degen's heart. As a former "good partner" of PumpFun, Raydium lost a significant portion of trading fees when PumpFun chose not to launch graduated tokens on Raydium in February.

Two months later, they were well-prepared. First, they sent out cook.meme to test the market, "cooking" two memecoins with market caps of tens of millions before "Time" and "Symmetra" lost market momentum. They then reignited the market through LetsBONK, and coincidentally, the first image on cook.meme's promotional material was BONK's avatar.

Multiple LaunchPads and DEX markets have now formed a multi-party confrontation. Everyone wants to grab this tempting cake. Raydium seems to be planning to counter PumpFun's "single brand" monopoly model with a "multi-brand" wheel war, showing initial success. The "subsidy war" in this battle has also brought more funds back to the market. However, in such a volatile market, we hope all readers will also do proper fund management while seeking opportunities.

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