LetsBONK's market cap surpasses $30 million in just 6 hours, Raydium launches counterattack against Pumpfun

On the early morning of April 26, the long-standing Solana meme coin BONK announced the launch of its own LaunchPad—LetsBonk.fun, and the market enthusiastically responded with chants of "LetsBONK!" Within 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 skyrocketing to a $30 million market cap in just 6 hours.

With so many projects issuing LaunchPads, why does BONK have such a huge impact? After the initial climax, is BONK a flash in the pan or will it continue to rise?

The Position of BONK in the Solana Ecosystem

When mentioning BONK, many people's first impression is the "yellow Shiba Inu logo," and the second impression is the "Saga phone airdrop." Going back to the roots, this yellow Shiba Inu was the first hero of 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.

Initially, the phone's sales were only 20-30 units per day, even after promotion, sales only reached 50-60 units. Selling 20,000 phones might take several years. In an interview with Laura Shin, Toly openly admitted to only selling 2,500 Saga phones. However, just three days later, within one day, they sold 15,000 phones. By then, the Saga airdrop BONK was worth several times the phone's price. Through the BONK airdrop, a new model was created, connecting physical products and the ecosystem through a Memecoin.

In an interview with Bankless, Toly expressed, "I believe that Solana developers and NFT developers are two groups. There is some overlap between them, but obviously, these are two different types of developers. BONK has connected the two groups, turning phones into NFTs, and BONK holders have 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 in DeFi, GameFi, developer communities, or direct participation in applications. It has already established more than 10 apps and integrated $BONK into over 100 ecosystems. And when the Solana ecosystem needs to kick off a LaunchPad battle, it comes back with LetsBonk.fun.

LetsBONK!

LaunchPad Mechanism

Within hours of BONK officially announcing its READ strategy focusing on "Reduce Supply, Expand Awareness, Accelerate Adoption, Drive Revenue," BONK launched LetsBONK.Fun, embodying the "Accelerate Adoption" strategy. "It's not enough to talk about $BONK, it needs to be used," they said, and they acted accordingly.

The BONK platform has a 1% transaction fee, with a portion used for validation by BONKSOL nodes and another portion used for the buyback and burn of $BONK, thus achieving "Reduce Supply" as well. Upon its launch, the platform received support from various projects within the Solana ecosystem and the OG community, including Dex leader Jupiter, crypto "Paypal" MoonPay, OG community MonkeDAO "SMB community," Solana founder Toly, and other key figures sending their congratulations for LetsBonk.

What Coins Does LetsBONK Have?

DUMPFUN

Within the first few hours of the LaunchPad release, three tokens emerged simultaneously. The first was DumpFun, the initial token deployed, which quickly soared to a $6 million market cap within three hours due to its first-mover advantage. However, as other tokens gained strength, its inherent unsuitability for hype led to a decline, and it has now plummeted to an $80,000 market cap.

LETSBONK

LetsBONK is the meme associated with the LetsBonk.fun platform. Although it did not start with a particularly high market cap, it was regarded in the market as the second coming of the Dragon. After reaching a peak market cap of $500,000 in the first wave, it experienced a temporary retreat to a $100,000 market cap as the high-flying DumpFun drained its energy. However, as DumpFun's candlesticks continued to weaken and more and more Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs), project teams, and community OGs chanted the slogan "LetsBonk," market attention returned to $LETSBONK. It opened low and soared high, skyrocketing to a $30 million market cap within 6 hours. This marked LetsBONK.fun's first "100x coin," and it has since retraced to a $10 million market cap as of the time of writing.

HOSICO

Hosico, originally a cute cat with 1.8 million followers on Instagram, is the Hosico issued on BONK, featuring a Studio Ghibli AI art style. It made a surprise move after 4 a.m., skyrocketing to a $10 million market cap within an hour. Unaffected by other token movements, it carved out its own market on the BONK platform, reaching a peak market cap of $23 million and currently sitting at $10 million.

NOM

NOM, the founder of the OG community MonkeDAO and the fitness app MoonWalk, is also a core member/initiator of BONK. The community generally holds a positive view of him. After experiencing a rollercoaster ride from a high of $5 million to a low of $900,000 in market cap, NOM himself tweeted thanking $NOM participants and hinted at future token applications. This caused the token price to surge to a $3.5 million market cap, currently retracing to $1.5 million. Like LetsBONK, it also has a "community slogan" — "Trust in Nom."

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 (around $629 million), becoming the second-largest selling entity apart from Solana's former backer, FTX/Alameda. Before the Pump AMM emerged, it caused Solana's foundation and retail holders distress. After establishing its own DEX, its ambition to monopolize the upstream and downstream became evident. The DEX has become tense, and thus "the world has long suffered from PumpFun" permeates every aspect of the ecosystem.

Despite this, even with numerous competitors like Jupiter, Raydium, Meteora, and Virtuals launching their LaunchPads, the responses have been lackluster. Faced with so many commercial adversaries, PumpFun's dominance in the LaunchPad and the frequency of selling SOL have a sense of "you may not like me, but you can't bring me down."

Meteora once did something similar to Raydium's current approach, proposing a strategic SDK to slowly erode PumpFun's market share through a brute force strategy. However, this attempt was not successful, and the results were not significant. Raydium, on the other hand, seems to understand the heart of on-chain Degen better. As a former "good partner" of PumpFun, after PumpFun chose not to launch its graduation token on Raydium in February, Raydium lost a significant portion of its trading fee revenue.

Two months later, they were well prepared. First, they sent out cook.meme to probe the market. After "Cooking" two meme coins with a market value in the tens of millions, "Time" and "Symmetra" lost their follow-up market momentum and remained stagnant for a while. They then reignited the market through LetsBONK. Coincidentally, the promotional image used by cook.meme featured BONK's logo prominently.

Promotional Image for cook.meme Launch

Today, Raydium's LaunchLab has integrated six platforms and launched trading reward missions to incentivize users to trade directly on Raydium. LaunchLab has shown initial success in trading volume, but further developments need to be continuously monitored.

Currently, the LaunchPad and DEX markets have formed a multi-party competition. Everyone wants a piece of this enticing cake. Raydium seems to be planning to counter Pumpfun's "single-brand" monopoly model with a "multi-brand" guerilla warfare strategy. The ultimate outcome remains unknown, with hopes that more retail investors will benefit and bring liquidity back to the market in this battle. However, in the current market conditions, "cash is king." I hope all readers searching for opportunities in the market will also focus on fund management.