Author: Cookie
The 'Meme Launchpad War' between Pump.fun and Letsbonk.fun has been ongoing for a month since early July. During this time, we have witnessed Pump.fun complete one of the largest ICOs in cryptocurrency history and seen Letsbonk.fun launch an offensive against Pump.fun's market share, successfully forming a suppression. During this period, some 'new players' have also joined the battle. Although they haven't made significant waves in the short term, they are still worth our understanding and attention.
Let's start with this data chart from Jupiter.
Although Letsbonk.fun has still occupied the top market share in the past 7 days, its ecological hot spots are showing completely different directions from those of Pump.fun.
Pump.fun: Is the PVE market returning?
On July 24, after receiving a live interview from threadguy, Pump.fun and its founder @a1lon9 entered a silence that lasted nearly half a month. Two weeks ago, everyone thought this was a 'public relations disaster' of a live interview because it profoundly affected the coin price, causing $PUMP to drop nearly 15% during the live broadcast, with a daily decline of nearly 20%, briefly falling below a $3 billion market cap.
Since the end of this live broadcast, the gap in market share between Pump.fun and Letsbonk.fun has not significantly narrowed. However, from July 30 to now, Pump.fun's reputation has significantly reversed.
The reason is simple — the community coins in the Pump.fun ecosystem have actually performed well during this period of market instability.
The image above was posted by Pump.fun's official Twitter on July 23, featuring meme coins from the Pump.fun ecosystem that many people view as 'officially selected'. Among these coins, $TROLL has 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, with a market cap briefly exceeding $35 million. $USDUC rose up to 2 times, with a market cap approaching $40 million. $CHILLHOUSE and $neet also achieved similar gains to $USDUC, with market caps briefly approaching $30 million and $18 million, respectively.
Among them, the newer faces have all been on an upward trend since July 25, with only 'streamer coins' and older coins like $FWOG and $michi, which have already had a large market cap and have been around for over 300 days, not keeping up with this market trend.
So what benefits do 'new coins' have? It seems there are none, as the silence of Pump.fun and Alon only ended two days ago. From a narrative perspective, these 'new coins' maintained high content output and community activity even during the lowest times for Pump.fun. At least during this period, they aligned 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 two days ago — $PUMP repurchase data dashboard.
"In the past 6 days, we have repurchased approximately $8,740 worth of SOL in $PUMP, which is 102% of our income during this period."
Earlier this morning, Pump.fun's official Twitter updated the cover image once again, promoting the 'officially selected' meme coins.
Interestingly, after the live broadcast on July 24, the meme coins purchased by Pump.fun's founder were almost all in a state of loss. However, as of now, all of his holdings have turned profitable, and the extent is not small.
For the meme coin market to revive, the first step is to 'put the clothes back on', meaning restoring players' confidence in meme coins, believing that meme coins are not just 'conspiracies'. Good narratives, good content, good communities, and sustained operations can ultimately make a meme coin shine. Although we need to continue observing 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 has many cards to play, such as airdrops and live broadcasts. This is a long road after the first step. With major exchanges like Binance and OKX no longer launching 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 house temporarily stuck in a bottleneck.
In the past 7 days, Letsbonk.fun's market share has still exceeded 50%, maintaining its top position. The recovery of Pump.fun's volume is mainly due to the excellent performance of 'new coins', but there haven't been many 'new coins' that have sparked widespread discussion.
In the past period, the "hot coins" such as $Ani have all occurred on Letsbonk.fun. The successful path of Pump.fun in the past has now been 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 around $200 million. $Memecoin has pulled back to around $11 million after once approaching a market cap of $60 million. $Bluechip has pulled back from a peak market cap of $17 million to $1.5 million, and $Ani has pulled back from a peak market cap of $86 million to about $30 million.
$$BONK and $$GP have both dropped 36% and 63% from their peaks.
Although related assets have performed poorly, the repurchase by Letsbonk.fun and its support for its ecological meme coins have not stopped. Rather than saying that the war between Letsbonk.fun and Pump.fun is still ongoing, it is more accurate to say that 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 tricks.
Bags was originally a social trading app that launched its token launchpad feature on May 22. Moonit is Helio's platform, which started at the end of April this year.
Recently, Bags has attracted attention for its 'donation narrative'. $CANCER donates 100% of its trading fee income to one of the world's most well-known and influential breast cancer charities, Susan G. Komen. It has already donated $35,000 to the organization and has transferred about 2.2% of $CANCER to it.
Because the coins launched on Bags can directly allocate the creators' trading fee income to a specific Twitter account, another token that has attracted attention, $WINRAR, has directly assigned its token revenue to the official Twitter account of the compression application WinRAR, which almost everyone has used. This caught the attention of WinRAR's official Twitter.
However, both of these coins ended like a gust of wind and are currently basically in a state of decline. As for Bags, the leading platform, it is hard to say that this platform currently has a leading position in terms of attention and market cap...
Moonit has a much larger setup. They have launched an AI protocol co-created by 9GAG, Memeland, Helio Pay, MoonPay, and Dexscreener, which can automatically tokenize online culture and viral memes.
In simple terms, this protocol automatically identifies popular memes on 9GAG and issues tokens, equivalent to 'automatically launching selected hot coins on 9GAG'. This mainly connects to 9GAG; if there is a platform that can connect TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, etc., I believe it can also create something like this.
For this model to work, there are still many issues to overcome. The foremost is that 'technology does not equal liquidity'; there are too many developers on the entire chain. If there is a blockbuster meme, everyone will rush to launch it, so whether the coins launched can unite in consensus, players may still consider the platform's liquidity.
The second issue is the problem of sustainable development. If the 9GAG community can be brought onto the coin, it would be more attractive. However, as everyone has seen in step 4 of the above image, it's the CTO... If the carefully selected 9GAG memes still require a CTO, it may indicate that the community foundation is still weak, and this potential advantage has not been fully utilized.
Moonit's new feature still hasn't produced a leading coin.
With more and more platforms, the problems to solve seem to have not decreased.
Conclusion
The meme launchpad war will continue in the foreseeable future. The immense success of Pump.fun in the past year has made everyone want to 'get a piece of the action'. But everyone is facing a severe problem — how to restore the market's interest and confidence in meme coins?
As CEXs seem to lack interest in launching new meme coins, can there be better infrastructure and liquidity on-chain to make meme coins great again?
Rather than saying it's a 'war', it is more accurate to say that all meme coin launchpads are facing a common test. After all, the lessons from inscriptions are right in front of us — the tools for inscriptions are becoming increasingly refined, but the craze for inscriptions has already disappeared.
I hope that in the end, the entire meme coin market will benefit, including all the crypto players who still love meme coins.