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

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

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

Half a month has passed, yet the LetsBONK frenzy has not subsided. The number of graduation tokens in the past 24 hours has surpassed PumpFun, especially after founder TOM taunted PumpFun for "plagiarizing" LetsBONK's creator motivation event and blacklisted their X account, intensifying the heat. With the participation of the "re-skinned" Believe, this Solana on-chain "Battle of a Hundred Regiments" is gradually becoming more exciting, bringing back long-lost liquidity and faster volatility to the chain.

BONK's Position 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." The origin of this yellow Shiba Inu is the key figure in Solana phone sales. When 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 promotions, it only reached 50-60 units. Selling 20,000 phones could take several years. During 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 that time, the Saga airdrop BONK was already several times the price of the phone. Through the BONK airdrop, a new model was created, connecting physical products with the ecosystem through a Memecoin.

Toly expressed this in an interview with Bankless, saying, "I think Solana developers and NFT developers are two groups, with some overlap between them, but clearly they are two different types of developers, and BONK has brought them together, turning smartphones into NFTs, with BONK holders having to pay attention to the mobile app ecosystem."

Two years have passed in the blink of an eye, and BONK has been continuously building in the Solana ecosystem for 2 years. Whether it's DeFi, GameFi, developer communities, or app introductions, they have already built more than 10 applications and integrated $BONK into over 100 ecosystems. And when the Solana ecosystem needed to kick off a LaunchPad battle, he came back with LetsBonk.fun.

LetsBONK!

LaunchPad Mechanism

Hours after BONK officially released its READ "Reduce Supply, Expand Awareness, Accelerate Adoption, Drive Revenue" four community guidelines, BONK launched LetsBONK.Fun, implementing the "Accelerate Adoption" guideline. "It's not enough to talk about $BONK, it needs to be used" was also put into action.

The transaction fee on the BONK platform is 1%, part of which is used for validation by the BONKSOL node, and part of which is used for buyback and burning of $BONK, thus achieving "Reduce Supply." Shortly after its launch, the platform received support from various projects and OG community members in the Solana ecosystem, including Dex leader Jupiter, crypto "Paypal" MoonPay, OG community MonkeDAO "SMB Community," Solana founder Toly, and other key figures who sent congratulatory messages to LetsBonk.

LETSBONK

LetsBONK is a meme that shares the same name as the LetsBonk.fun platform. Initially, although it did not have a particularly high market value, the market recognized it as the "Dragon II" due to specific reasons. After reaching a market value of $500,000 in the first wave, during the peak, DumpFun's vampire-like behavior caused it to drop back to a $100,000 market value. As DumpFun's candlesticks continued to weaken, and more and more Key Opinion Leaders (KOL), project teams, and community Original Gangsters (OG) shouted the slogan "LetsBonk," market attention returned to $LETSBONK. The price opened low and rose high, skyrocketing to a $30 million market value within 6 hours. This was also the first "100x coin" hit by LetsBONK.fun since its launch, and as of the deadline, it has retraced to a $10 million market value.

HOSICO

Hosico was originally a cute cat with 1.8 million followers on Instagram. The Hosico issued on BONK is a Ghibli AI-style Hosico. It spiked after 4 a.m. and rose to a $10 million market value within an hour. Unaffected by the price movements of other tokens, it charted an independent market on the BONK platform's native tokens, reaching a peak market value of $23 million and is now trading at $10 million.

USELESS

USELESS stems from a tweet posted by BONKGUY on Twitter X stating, "This is a useless currency that should not be pumped." This type of concept, similar to "FARTCOIN," "SHIT," "HOUSECOIN," and other absurd emotionalizations, is beloved in the Euro-American community. Since BONK's launch, its market value has soared all the way to $34 million and has now retraced to $20 million.

DAZHUANG

Ever since BONKGUY connected with the Chinese-speaking community, it seems to have kicked off a "Chinese IP" express mode. After yesterday's IKUN market cap soared to $15 million, today a gorilla image named DAZHUANG appeared on the chain, with a meme-filled appearance similar to U.S. Vice President Vance. The market's FOMO is beyond imagination. Just by replying to DEGEN DIOR's on-chain comment, "I have a monkey for you," the DAZHUANG token has skyrocketed to over $3 million.

Believe? Clout? Just Believe?

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

In January this year, with a product claiming to be the social version of the "Nasdaq" appearing on the Soalna chain, several Solana ecosystem OGs provided strong support and brought many Web2 tech projects to the crypto world for "coin issuance." However, the participants' experience was not very good, with many tokens going to zero in a short time, and the mobile app crashing shortly after launch. Even if tokens were purchased on the app, they did not arrive. Since then, the project has disappeared until recently when it reappeared under the renamed "Believe" project.

And this time, he has brought more Web2 talent to blockchain for coin issuance. This time, he brought Alex Leiman, another young entrepreneur, who previously released applications such as RizzGPT and Astra, with a total download volume of over 10 million times. The snake game NOODLE issued by him now has a market cap of $14 million.

On the other hand, tokens issued by employees from a well-known AI company are also gaining market popularity. The token GOONC issued by OpenAI's employee Pata van Goon has also surpassed a market cap of $30 million.

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

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's market value has already exceeded $20 million.

By creating multiple "products" with a market value of over $10 million in a short period, the ecosystem has generated over $2.24 million in 24-hour transaction fee revenue. Additionally, the founder's coin "Pasternak," issued during the previous Clout era, reached a market value of $1.4 billion, surpassing its previous high of $80 million and plummeting to only $180,000 in market value. Although the process is very lengthy, the concept of "off-chain talent introduction" seems to be taking shape beyond the on-chain issuer.

PumpFun Against the World

As of April, in just a year and a half, PumpFun has sold a total of 3.403 million Sol coins (approximately $629 million), becoming the second-largest sell-off entity after the Solana-supported institution FTX/Alameda. Before the appearance of Pump AMM, it was only a source of distress for the Solana Foundation and retail investors. However, after establishing its own DEX, its ambition to dominate the upstream and downstream has become evident. The DEX has become nervous, and now "the world has long been troubled by PumpFun" permeates every aspect of the ecosystem.

Even so, despite Jupiter, Raydium, Meteora, Virtuals, and dozens of other projects launching their LaunchPads one after another, the responses have been lackluster. Faced with so many commercial enemies, PumpFun's dominance in the LaunchPad and the frequency of Sol shipments are terrifying, giving rise to a sense of "you may not like me, but you can't beat me."

Meteora once tried a strategy similar to Raydium's current approach by proposing an SDK, attempting to slowly erode PumpFun's market share with a numbers game, but it was unsuccessful, and the results were not significant. Raydium clearly understands the heart of on-chain degens better. As PumpFun's former "good partner," Raydium lost a large portion of its trading fee revenue after PumpFun decided in February not to launch any more tokens graduating on Raydium.

Two months later, they were well prepared. First, they 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 momentum. They then remained inactive for a period before reigniting the market through LetsBONK. Interestingly, the promotional image released by cook.meme featured BONK's logo as the first item.

cook.meme's promotional image release

Today, Raydium's LaunchLab has integrated six platforms and initiated trading reward missions to encourage users to trade directly on Raydium. The LaunchLab has shown initial success in trading volume, but its future development requires continuous monitoring.

Multiple launchpads and DEX markets have now established a competitive stance, with everyone vying for a piece of the enticing cake. Raydium appears to be planning to counter Pumpfun's monopolistic model with a "multi-brand" wheel-to-wheel battle against the "single-brand" dominance. The initial success is promising, and the "subsidy war" in this battle has also 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 to practice proper fund management.

Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:

Telegram Subscription Group: https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Official Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia