LetsBonk Surpasses Pumpfun, Believe Hits Billion Dollar Market Cap, Meme LaunchPad Competition Heats Up

Original Title "LetsBONK Market Cap Breaks $30 Million in 6 Hours, Raydium Launches Counterattack Against Pumpfun"

This article was first published on April 27, with some content being newly edited.

In the early morning of April 26, Solana's veteran Meme coin BONK announced the launch of its own LaunchPad—LetsBonk.fun. The market responded enthusiastically, with everyone chanting "LetsBONK!" In just 24 hours, it created 800,000 visitors, $3 billion in trading volume, 2,700 tokens being created, with over 70 successfully launched. The token Let's BONK itself skyrocketed to a $30 million market cap in just 6 hours.

Half a month has passed, but the LetsBONK craze hasn't died down. The number of graduate tokens in the past 24 hours has surpassed PumpFun, especially after founder TOM taunted PumpFun and then blacklisted their X account following accusations of "copying" LetsBONK's creator reward activity. With the involvement of Believe who came back for a "rebrand," this Solana on-chain "war of a hundred schools" has gradually become intense, bringing back long-lost liquidity and faster volatility to the chain in any case.

The Position of BONK in the Solana Ecosystem

When it comes to BONK, many people's first impression is the "yellow Shiba Inu logo," and the second impression is the "Saga phone airdrop." In fact, this yellow Shiba Inu is the first hero of Solana phone sales. When Solana introduced the Solana phone, the goal was to create an ecosystem. The first step was to issue a phone, but the key point was to create a crypto-first app store, allowing crypto participants to not be limited by Apple and Google's ecosystems.

Initially, the phone's sales were only 20-30 units per day, even after promotion, sales only reached 50-60 units. It might take several years to sell 20,000 phones. In Toly's appearance on Laura Shin's podcast, he admitted to selling only 2,500 Saga phones, but just three days later, they sold 15,000 phones in just one day. By this time, the Saga airdrop BONK was worth several times the phone's price. Through the BONK airdrop, a new model was created, connecting physical products with the ecosystem through a Memecoin.

During an interview with Bankless, Toly expressed, "I think Solana developers and NFT developers are two distinct groups, with some overlap between them. However, these are clearly two different types of developers, and BONK has connected the two, turning a phone into an NFT, with BONK holders having to pay attention to the mobile app ecosystem."

Fast forward two years, and BONK has been actively building in the Solana ecosystem for 2 years. Whether it's DeFi, GameFi, developer communities, or application onboarding, they have already established more than 10 applications and integrated $BONK into over 100 ecosystems. And when the Solana ecosystem needed to kick off a LaunchPad battle, he returned with LetsBonk.fun.

LetsBONK!

LaunchPad Mechanism

Shortly after BONK officially announced the four community guidelines of "Reduce Supply, Expand Awareness, Accelerate Adoption, Drive Revenue" in READ, BONK launched LetsBONK.Fun, implementing the "Accelerate Adoption" guideline. "It's not enough to talk about $BONK, it needs to be used," a commitment was made.

The BONK platform has a 1% transaction fee, a portion of which is used for validation by the BONKSOL node, and a part of it is used for buyback and burning of $BONK, thus achieving "Reduce Supply." The platform was well received by various projects and OG communities within the Solana ecosystem. Dex leader Jupiter, crypto "Paypal" MoonPay, OG community MonkeDAO "SMB Community," Solana founder Toly, and other key figures in the community all sent their congratulations to LetsBonk.

LETSBONK

LetsBONK is a meme named after the LetsBonk.fun platform. Although it did not have a particularly high market value initially, the market identified it as a "Dragon Two" for the first time. After reaching a peak of $500,000 market value in the first wave, it was briefly brought back to a $100,000 market value by the surging DumpFun. As DumpFun's candlestick chart continued to weaken and more and more Key Opinion Leaders (KOL), project teams, and community Original Gangsters (OG) chanted the slogan "LetsBonk," market attention returned to $LETSBONK. It opened low and rose high, skyrocketing to a $30 million market value within 6 hours. This was also the first "100x coin" created by LetsBONK.fun after its launch, and it has since retraced to a $10 million market value as of the deadline.

HOSICO

Hosico, originally a cute cat with 1.8 million followers on Instagram, was reimagined in the Ghibli AI style on BONK. Hosico stormed in after 4 a.m., reaching a $10 million market value within 1 hour. Unaffected by the fluctuations of other tokens, it charted its own course among the BONK platform's tokens, peaking at a $23 million market value and currently sitting at $10 million.

USELESS

USELESS stems from a tweet by BONKGUY posted on X stating, "This is a type of useless currency that should not be pumped." This type of whimsical, nihilistic concept, similar to "FARTCOIN," "SHIT," "HOUSECOIN," etc., is beloved in the European and American communities. Since the launch of BONK, its market value has skyrocketed to $34 million, but has since retraced to $20 million.

DAZHUANG

Ever since BONKGUY connected with the Chinese community, it seems to have kicked off a "Chinese IP" express mode. After yesterday's IKUN Market Cap Express to $15 million, today a gorilla image named DAZHUANG appeared on-chain, resembling the image of U.S. Vice President Vans, full of meme color. The market's FOMO is beyond imagination. Just by replying to on-chain DEGEN DIOR's "I have a monkey for you" comment, the DAZHUANG token quickly broke through $3 million.

Believe? Clout? Just Believe?

Believe/Clout founder Ben Pasternak is a 25-year-old Australian "entrepreneurial genius" who developed the game "Impossible Rush" at the age of 15, breaking into the Top 20 of the App Store U.S. region. At 17, he founded the teenage social platform Monkey with over 20 million users, and at 20, he pivoted to plant-based chicken nuggets NUGGS, capturing Walmart shelves.

In January of this year, with the product touted as the social version of the "Nasdaq" appearing on the Solana chain, several Solana ecosystem OGs gave strong support and brought many Web2 tech projects into the crypto world to "launch coins." However, participants' experience was not very good, with many tokens going to zero in a short time, and the mobile app crashing after some time online. Even if tokens were purchased on the app, they did not appear in the wallet. Since then, the project disappeared until recently when it reappeared under the rebranded name "Believe."

And this time, he has brought more Web2 talent to launch coins on the blockchain, including fellow young entrepreneur Alex Leiman, who previously released apps like RizzGPT, Astra, with a total download count exceeding 10 million. The snake game NOODLE he released is now valued at $14 million.

On the other hand, tokens issued by employees from a well-known AI company are also highly welcomed by the market. The token GOONC, issued by OpenAI employee Pata van Goon, has also broken through a $30 million market cap.

Meanwhile, Meta's software engineer RubenNorte has claimed to have stepped out of the comfort zone and initiated a project beyond the existing MCP structure in his personal time — oMSCP. The token issued for this project has also surpassed a $5 million market cap.

Alex Finn, on the other hand, independently trained a personalized AI content assistant application. It is claimed that after feeding the AI with over millions of X posts, this AI can bring users a high-traffic AI product called Creator Buddy. Although a monthly subscription fee of $50 is required to use it, the BUDDY token market cap has already exceeded $20 million.

By creating multiple "products" with market caps of over $10 million in a short period of time, the ecosystem's 24-hour fee revenue has exceeded $2.24 million. Additionally, the founder coin "Pasternak," issued during the last Clout era, reached a market cap of $1.4 billion, surpassing its previous high of $80 million. Previously, the token's market cap had plummeted from its peak of $80 million to only $180,000 in market cap. Although the process has been very lengthy, it seems that the concept of "out-of-chain talent introduction" is beginning to take shape.

PumpFun Against the World

As of April, in just a year and a half, Pumpfun has sold a total of 3.403 million Sol tokens (approximately $629 million), becoming the second-largest sell-off entity after Solana's former backer, FTX/Alameda. Prior to the emergence of the Pump AMM, this action only caused distress to the Solana Foundation and retail investors. However, after establishing its own DEX, its ambition to monopolize the upstream and downstream sectors became evident. The DEX is now tense, and the saying "the world has long been suffering from PumpFun" permeates all aspects of the ecosystem.

Even so, despite facing numerous competitors such as Jupiter, Raydium, Meteora, and Virtuals, dozens of projects have launched their own LaunchPads, but the response has been lackluster. Confronted with so many commercial opponents, PumpFun's terrorizing market share in LaunchPad and the frequency of selling Sol tokens have left a sense of "you may not like me, but you can't stop me."

Meteora once attempted something similar to Raydium's current strategy, proposing an SDK strategy, aiming to slowly erode PumpFun's market share with a large user base. However, it was not successful, and the effectiveness was not significant. Raydium clearly understands the hearts of on-chain Degens better. As a former "good partner" of PumpFun, after PumpFun chose not to launch graduation tokens on Raydium in February, Raydium lost a significant portion of its trading fee income.

Two months later, they were quite prepared. They first sent out cook.meme to probe the market. After successfully launching two meme coins with a market cap in the tens of millions, Time and Symmetra lost their momentum. They then remained inactive for a period before reigniting the market through LetsBONK. Coincidentally, the first avatar on the promotional image released by cook.meme was that of BONK.

The promotional image released by cook.meme

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 its future development requires continuous monitoring and observation.

Multiple launchpads and DEX markets have now established a multi-party competition. Everyone is vying for this enticing opportunity. Raydium seems to have planned a confrontation against Pumpfun's monopoly model through a "multi-brand" wheel strategy, with initial success. Moreover, the "subsidy war" in this battle has seen more funds flowing back from launch platforms to the market. However, in such a volatile market, it is advisable for all readers seeking opportunities in the market to practice proper fund management.