Howdy!

It appears Solana’s technology has gotten 43% worse over the past month. The vibes just never recovered after MELANIA dropped.

Today, we’ve got pump.fun’s AMM, SOL’s unlocks, and tokenized time:

Pump.fun said to be ditching Raydium

Crypto’s most lucrative tech marriage appears headed for a divorce.

Presently, the Solana memecoin launchpad pump.fun migrates tokens with sufficient liquidity to trade on Raydium, a Solana-based automated market maker. The so-called graduation mechanism has proven very profitable for Raydium: Pump.fun pools accounted for 36% of the DEX’s $154 million in 2024 swap revenue.

That looks set to change, as an amm.pump.fun URL recently went online, and an onchain sleuth posted evidence that pump.fun was testing liquidity pools for its own AMM. Raydium’s token is down some 40% since Sunday as investors respond to a looming dent in the protocol’s revenue.

AMMs are easy enough to spin up in the open-source world of crypto, and pump.fun’s aspirations to create its own had been spinning around the Solana rumor mill for some time. By graduating memecoins to its own AMM, pump.fun would vertically integrate the token launch process — and potentially push its already-gaudy revenue figures even higher. 

Pump.fun had at least one other potential suitor for its AMM needs. Ellipsis Labs contacted the launchpad about implementing Plasma, an AMM designed to limit sandwich attacks, two sources with knowledge of the matter told Blockworks. Pump.fun declined the offer. 

Regardless, the in-house AMM launch feels like a pretty obvious move. Pump.fun apparently plans to launch a token, and having its own fee-collecting AMM could provide value accrual to that token. That likely may depend on whether hardcore memecoin traders deem the pump.fun AMM liquid enough to be worth their time.

On X yesterday, anonymous Raydium core contributor Infra warned that pump.fun would be making a “strategic miscalculation” launching its own AMM since Raydium provided the “liquidity that helped Pump tokens thrive.”

It’s unclear how good of a look the world would get into any future pump.fun AMM. The memecoin launchpad is closed-source, so it would be a slight change in direction if it releases a fully open-source AMM.

— Jack

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SOL’s price is nuking for a few reasons, but one of them seems to be these looming unlocks:

11.2 million SOL — or around 2% of the current circulating supply — are set to be unlocked from the FTX estate on March 1, according to Messari. I’ve heard the unlocks cited a couple times in conversations about SOL’s prospects.

But if this market sell-off is doing anything, it’s making selling a much less attractive prospect for estate buyers.

— Jack

Tokenizing time isn't a new idea — Time Republik tried it over a decade ago. Your humble author even launched his own time banking app and token on the Counterparty layer of Bitcoin back in 2015 (called Time Vault). 

But despite being, frankly, an excellent idea, time banking has never really caught on.

It's a simple concept to grasp: Users tokenize minutes of their time, which can be bought, traded, and redeemed for access — whether that's a DM, a consultation, or a group chat. In theory, this creates a liquid market for attention and expertise. The problem has always been that demand is asymmetric — some people's time is inherently more valuable than others, and most users simply don't want to pay for access to someone they could otherwise reach for free.

Time.fun has a fresh take on the model, integrating a liquid trading mechanism and a rewards pool to gamify engagement, and it just launched on Solana. With the Solana Foundation already participating (and proceeds going to charity), the question now is whether Time.fun can succeed where others stalled — or if time banking remains an idea that never quite finds its moment.

Takeaway: As currencies go, time is probably the most important asset class in the world. It's provably scarce, unique to the holder, decidedly finite, liquid, and impossible to hoard. You can't print more, you never know exactly how much you have (but always less than yesterday). 

If anything should be allocated with maximum efficiency and intent, it's time.

— Jeff

A message from Cindy Leow, co-founder of Drift: