Raydium has launched LaunchLab, a Pump.fun clone with unique pricing features, sparking divided opinions across the crypto community.
Raydium has announced the launch of LaunchLab, a new platform designed for creating and launching tokens—similar to Solana’s Pump.fun, as originally reported by Blockworks. Raydium’s (RAY) LaunchLab is essentially a clone of Pump.fun—but better in terms of features. LaunchLab shines over Pump.fun in that it allows users to determine how a token’s price will change as its demand increases. The price change trajectory can be set to linear, exponential, or logarithmic. In addition to the post-launch price change behavior, third-party interfaces can integrate with LaunchLab and charge their own transaction fees on top of the standard fees.
An anonymous Raydium developer told Blockworks that LaunchLab has been in development for several months, but the company kept it shelved so as not to appear that Raydium was trying to directly compete with Pump.fun and other launchpads.
However, Raydium changed course and decided to roll out LaunchLab after Pump.fun announced plans to launch its own AMM, though the developer explained that LaunchLab isn’t meant to replace Pump.fun or any other launchpad for that matter. Rather, the platform is meant to serve teams who want to create and manage their tokens without building everything from zero.
Even though Raydium’s LaunchLab doesn’t claim to compete directly with Pump.fun, the timing is suspicious. It looks like Raydium is trying to protect its revenue stream as Pump.fun has been sending a lot of its trading activity to Raydium, helping it to bag significant profits from trading fees.
When a token created on Pump.fun reaches a market cap of $69,000, part of its liquidity is automatically sent to a Raydium’s trading pool, after which it’s burned. This effectively renders those tokens permanently unavailable, which increases the value of the remaining tokens. Thanks to this mechanism, 41% of Raydium’s swap revenue in the last month has come from Pump.fun’s memecoins, according to Blockworks Research.
The news was met with mixed sentiment well-encapsulated by Zhu Su’s tweet, which highlighted that fee compression is good for users. But he pointed out that community and lore are what truly drive the success of projects like Pump.fun, implying that those aspects will be harder for Raydium to replicate.
Raydium’s token RAY is up by 12% on the daily timeframe, suggesting that the news were well-received.
