PUMP Rises Against the Trend, What Happened on Meme Launchpad in the Past Two Weeks

The "meme launchpad battle" between pump.fun and Letsbonk.fun has lasted for one month since early July. During this period, we have witnessed pump.fun completing one of the largest ICOs in cryptocurrency history, and also seen Letsbonk.fun launching an attack on pump.fun's market share and successfully suppressing it. During this time, some "new players" have also joined the battle, although they have not caused much turbulence in the short term, they are worth our understanding and attention.

Let's start with this Jupiter data chart.

Although Letsbonk.fun still holds the top position in market share over the past 7 days, the hotspots within its ecosystem have taken a completely different direction compared to pump.fun.

pump.fun: Return of PVE Trends?

On July 24, after the live interview with threadguy, pump.fun and its founder @a1lon9 went into a near-half-month silence. Half a month ago, many people thought this was a "public relations disaster" live interview because it significantly affected the coin price, with $PUMP dropping nearly 15% during the live stream, with a single-day drop of nearly 20%, and briefly falling below a 3 billion USD market cap.

From the end of that live stream to now, the gap between pump.fun and Letsbonk.fun in terms of market share has not shown significant narrowing. However, from July 30 onwards, the reputation of pump.fun has shown a relatively significant reversal.

The reason is simple — the community coins in the pump.fun ecosystem have performed well during this period of unstable market conditions.

The above image posted by the official pump.fun Twitter on July 23 features pump.fun ecosystem meme coins that many people consider as "officially selected." Among these coins, $TROLL has been the most outstanding, rising up to 9 times since July 25, with its market cap exceeding 100 million USD. In the same period, $Tokabu rose up to about 5 times, with its market cap reaching over 35 million USD. $USDUC rose up to 2 times, with its market cap approaching 40 million USD. $CHILLHOUSE and $neet also achieved similar gains to $USDUC, with their market caps reaching close to 30 million USD and 18 million USD respectively.

Among these new faces, all have been rising since July 25, while "streamer coins" and older coins such as $FWOG and $michi, which already have larger market caps and have been around for more than 300 days, have not followed this trend much.

So, do these "new coins" have any advantages? It seems not, because pump.fun and alon's silence only ended a few days ago. If we talk about narrative, these "new coins" have maintained high levels of content output and community activity during the lowest point of pump.fun, at least in the past period, they have met pump.fun's expectations for the long-term sustainable development of meme coins.

And the "counterattack" from pump.fun's official side, we only learned about their first step a few days ago — the $PUMP buyback data dashboard.

"In the past 6 days, we repurchased approximately 8740 SOL worth of $PUMP, which is 102% of our revenue during this period."

And today, the official pump.fun Twitter updated the cover image again, once again promoting the "officially selected" meme coins:

Interestingly, after the live stream on July 24, the meme coins bought by the pump.fun founder were almost all in loss. But now, his holdings have all turned profitable, with significant gains:

For the meme coin market to recover, the first step is to "put on clothes back," meaning to regain players' confidence in meme coins, believing that meme coins are not just "conspiracies." Good narratives, good content, good communities, and continuous operations can eventually make a meme coin shine. Although we still 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 beginning.

Next, pump.fun still has many cards to play, such as airdrops and live streams. This is a long road after the first step. In the absence of major exchanges like Binance and OKX listing new Solana meme coins, pump.fun must explore more possibilities.

The revolution is not yet complete; comrades still need to strive.

Letsbonk.fun: A New Home for Meme Coins Facing Short-Term Bottlenecks

Over the past 7 days, Letsbonk.fun's market share still exceeded 50%, maintaining its leading position. The revival of pump.fun's buzz mainly comes from the excellent performance of "new coins," but there hasn't been much discussion about "new coins" in general.

Meanwhile, the "hot spots" in the past period, such as $Ani, occurred on Letsbonk.fun. The successful path that pump.fun once took is now occupied by Letsbonk.fun.

In contrast, the "large-cap" coins on Letsbonk.fun have recently experienced a decline. $USELESS has declined from a peak of 400 million USD market cap to around 200 million USD, $memecoin has declined from a peak of 60 million USD market cap to around 11 million USD, $Bluechip has declined from a peak of 17 million USD market cap to around 1.5 million USD, and $Ani has declined from a peak of 86 million USD market cap to around 30 million USD.

$$BONK and $$GP have also dropped by 36% and 63% respectively from their peaks.

Although related assets have performed poorly, Letsbonk.fun's buybacks and support for its ecosystem meme coins have not stopped. Rather than saying the war between Letsbonk.fun and pump.fun continues, it's more accurate to say both are striving. Only when the overall confidence in the meme coin market is restored will both have a better future.

Peace and love, looking forward to Letsbonk.fun's subsequent performance.

Bags and Moonit: Old Platforms, New Tactics

Bags was originally a social trading application, and they launched the token launchpad feature on May 22. Moonit is a platform from Helio, which was launched at the end of April this year.

What has recently attracted attention to Bags is the "donation narrative." $CANCER donates 100% of its transaction fee income to one of the most renowned and influential breast cancer charities, Susan G. Komen, and has already donated 35,000 USD to the organization, as well as transferred approximately 2.2% of $CANCER to the organization.

Because the coins launched on Bags can directly assign the creator's transaction fee income to a specific Twitter account, another coin that has attracted attention is $WINRAR, which directly assigns the token income to the official Twitter of the widely used compression software WinRAR. This attracted a response from the official Twitter of WinRAR.

However, these two coins have also faded quickly, and are basically in a state of having fallen completely now. As for the leader of the Bags platform, after checking around, it is difficult to say that the platform currently has a clear leader in terms of both attention and market cap...

Moonit has a much bigger scale. They launched an AI protocol jointly created by 9GAG, Memeland, Helio Pay, MoonPay, and Dexscreener, which can automatically tokenize internet culture and viral memes.

In short, this protocol uses AI to identify popular memes on 9GAG and then automatically issues tokens, equivalent to "automatically launching selected hotspots from 9GAG." This mainly connects the 9GAG link. If a platform can connect Tiktok, Instagram, Twitter, etc., it could also do something like this.

If this model is to be run smoothly, there are still many problems to overcome. The first is "technology does not equal liquidity." There are too many devs on the chain, and if a viral meme appears, everyone will rush to issue tokens, so whether the issued tokens can gather consensus, players may still consider the platform's liquidity.

The second is the issue of sustained development. If the 9GAG community can be brought onto the coin, it would be very attractive. However, as you can see in the fourth step of the image above, it's CTO... If the selected 9GAG meme still needs 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 has not yet produced a leader either.

More platforms are emerging, but the problems to solve seem no fewer.

Conclusion

The meme launchpad battle will continue in the foreseeable future. The great success of pump.fun over the past year has made everyone want to "eat the meat." But everyone is also facing a serious problem — how to restore market interest and confidence in meme coins?

When CEXs seem to show little interest in listing new meme coins, can the blockchain have better infrastructure and liquidity to make meme coins great again?

Rather than calling it a "war," it's more like a test faced by all meme coin launchpads. After all, the lessons from the previous failure of inscriptions are right in front of us — the tools for inscribing are becoming more perfect, but the hype around inscriptions has long disappeared.

I hope that ultimately, the entire meme coin market and all the players who still like meme coins in the crypto world benefit.