Original author: Cookie, BlockBeats
Reprint: Luke, Mars Finance
The 'meme launchpad battle' between pump.fun and Letsbonk.fun has already lasted a month from early July to now. During this time, we have witnessed pump.fun complete one of the largest ICOs in cryptocurrency history and seen Letsbonk.fun attack pump.fun's market share and successfully form a suppression. During this period, some 'new characters' have also joined the battle. Although they haven't stirred up too much in the short term, they are worth our understanding and attention.
Let's start with this data chart from Jupiter.
Although Letsbonk.fun has still occupied the top of the market share chart in the past 7 days, its hot topics within the pump.fun ecosystem have shown completely different directions.
pump.fun: Is PVE market returning?
On July 24, after completing a live interview with threadguy, pump.fun and its founder @a1lon9 entered a nearly two-week silence. Two weeks ago, everyone thought this was a 'public relations disaster' of a live interview because it significantly impacted coin prices; $PUMP dropped nearly 15% during the live stream, with a daily decline of almost 20%, briefly falling below a market cap of $3 billion.
Since the end of this live stream until now, the gap in market share between pump.fun and Letsbonk.fun has not significantly narrowed. However, from July 30 to now, the reputation of pump.fun has shown a significant reversal.
The reason is simple—community coins in the pump.fun ecosystem have performed well during this unstable market period.
The image above was posted by pump.fun's official Twitter on July 23, featuring meme coins in the pump.fun ecosystem that many people view as 'officially selected'. Among these coins, $TROLL performed the best, rising up to 9 times since July 25, with a market cap exceeding $100 million. During the same period, $Tokabu rose about 5 times, briefly exceeding a market cap of $35 million. $USDUC rose up to 2 times, nearing a market cap of $4 million. $CHILLHOUSE and $neet also achieved similar gains to $USDUC, with market caps briefly approaching $30 million and $18 million, respectively.
Among the newer faces, there has been a rising trend since July 25, with only the 'streamer coins' and older coins like $FWOG and $michi, which already had larger market caps and have been around for over 300 days, not keeping up with this wave of market.
So what benefits does the 'new coin' offer? It seems there are none, as the silence of pump.fun and alon only ended the day before yesterday. From a narrative perspective, these 'new coins' maintained a high level of content output and community activity even during the lowest point of pump.fun, at least during this time, which aligns well with pump.fun's expectations for the long-term sustainable development of meme coins.
The 'counterattack' from pump.fun's official side was only revealed to us the day before yesterday—the $PUMP repurchase data dashboard.
'In the past 6 days, we have repurchased about $PUMP worth 8,740 SOL, which is 102% of our revenue during this time.'
Earlier today, pump.fun's official Twitter updated its cover image, once again promoting 'officially selected' meme coins:
Interestingly, after the live stream on July 24, the meme coins purchased by pump.fun's founder were almost all in a loss state. Now, all of his holdings have turned profitable, and by a significant margin:
For the meme coin market to revive, the first step is to 'put the clothes back on', which means restoring players' confidence in meme coins, believing that meme coins are not just about 'conspiracies'. Good narratives, good content, good communities, and continuous operations can ultimately make a meme coin succeed. Although we still need to observe the performance of these coins on pump.fun, it can be said that if it can be maintained, this is a good start.
Next, pump.fun still holds many cards, such as airdrops and live streaming. This is a long road after the first step. With major exchanges like Binance and OKX almost no longer listing new Solana meme coins, pump.fun must explore more possibilities.
The revolution has not yet succeeded, comrades still need to work hard.
Letsbonk.fun: A new coin home that has recently hit a bottleneck.
In the past 7 days, Letsbonk.fun's market share has still exceeded 50%, maintaining the top position. The resurgence of pump.fun's voice is mainly due to the excellent performance of 'newly listed coins', which actually didn't spark widespread discussions about 'new coins'.
Recent 'hot topics', such as $Ani, have all occurred on Letsbonk.fun. The successful path of pump.fun in the past is now occupied by Letsbonk.fun.
In contrast, the 'big targets' on Letsbonk.fun have recently experienced a pullback. $USELESS has pulled back from a peak market cap of $400 million to about $200 million, $memecoin pulled back from nearly $60 million to around $11 million, $Bluechip pulled back from a peak of $17 million to $1.5 million, and $Ani pulled back from a peak of $86 million to about $30 million.
$$BONK and $$GP have also fallen by 36% and 63% from their peak.
Although related assets have performed poorly, the repurchase by Letsbonk.fun and its support for its ecosystem meme coins have not stopped. Rather than saying the war between Letsbonk.fun and pump.fun is still ongoing, it is more accurate to say both are working hard in their own ways. Only when the overall confidence in the meme coin market is restored will both have a better future.
Peace and love, looking forward to the follow-up performance of Letsbonk.fun.
Bags and Moonit: Old platforms, new tactics.
Bags was originally a social trading application. They launched the token launchpad feature on May 22. Moonit is the platform for Helio, which started at the end of April this year.
Bags has recently attracted attention for its 'donation narrative'. $CANCER donates 100% of its transaction fee revenue to one of the world's most well-known and influential breast cancer charity organizations, Susan G. Komen. They have already donated $35,000 to the organization and transferred about 2.2% of $CANCER to them.
Because the coins launched on Bags can directly allocate the creator's transaction fee income to a specific Twitter account, another token that has garnered attention, $WINRAR, directly allocated its token income to the official Twitter account of the widely used compression application WinRAR. This attracted a reply from WinRAR's official Twitter.
However, both of these coins ended as quickly as a gust of wind, and they are currently in a state of decline. As for the leading platform Bags, looking around, it is hard to say that this platform currently has a leader in terms of attention and market value...
Moonit's scale is much larger. They launched an AI protocol jointly created by 9GAG, Memeland, Helio Pay, MoonPay, and Dexscreener, which can automatically tokenize online culture and viral memes.
In simple terms, this protocol identifies popular memes on 9GAG through AI and automatically issues tokens, equivalent to 'automatically launching selected hot topics on 9GAG'. This mainly connects to 9GAG; if there were a platform that could link TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media, I believe similar things could be done.
If this model is to be viable, there are still quite a few issues to overcome. The foremost is 'technology does not equal liquidity'; there are too many developers on-chain, and if there is a hit meme, everyone will rush to launch it, so whether the coins released can reach a consensus is still something players will consider regarding the platform's liquidity.
The second issue is sustainability. If the 9GAG community can be brought to the coins, that would be attractive. However, as everyone can see, the fourth step in the diagram above is CTO... If your selected 9GAG memes still need a CTO, it may indicate that the community foundation is still weak, and this potential advantage has not been fully realized.
Moonit's new feature still hasn't produced a leader.
With the increasing number of platforms, the problems to be solved seem to have not decreased.
Conclusion
The meme launchpad battle will continue for the foreseeable future. The tremendous success pump.fun achieved in the past year has made everyone want to 'get a piece of the pie'. But everyone also faces a serious question—how to restore the market's interest and confidence in meme coins?
As CEXs seem to be uninterested in launching new meme coins, can there be better infrastructure and liquidity on-chain to make meme coins great again?
Rather than calling it a 'war', it's more accurate to say that all meme coin launchpads are facing a test together. After all, the lessons of the past are right in front of us—the tools for inscriptions are becoming more refined, but the craze for inscriptions has already faded away.
I hope the ultimate beneficiaries are the entire meme coin market and all the crypto players who still love meme coins.
