Howdy!

I kid you not, a PR person sent me a pitch today formatted as an entry in Morning Routine Guy’s journal. I still turned it down. It’s a cold world out there, folks.

Today, we’ve got pump.fun’s AMM, Tron taking Solana’s crown, and USDC’s Japan launch:

PumpSwap is already the second-largest AMM on Solana

Last week, pump.fun completed Solana’s most consequential DEX launch in some time when it unveiled PumpSwap, an automated market maker for pump.fun token migrations.

Today, pump.fun passed Whirlpool to become the second-largest Solana AMM by volume, according to a Dune dashboard. Raydium — which used to be pump.fun’s AMM of choice — still leads the category with 50% market share compared to PumpSwap’s 18%, but the brand new AMM’s growth is noteworthy nonetheless.

Over the past 24 hours, PumpSwap’s largest liquidity pool by volume contains tokens with the tickers DOGEMOON and ballscoin, according to the dashboard.

PumpSwap is supposed to offer some benefits compared to pump.fun’s previous Raydium arrangement. For starters, SOL liquidity is no longer removed from a pump.fun token that completes its bonding curve. Pump.fun will instead drive revenue from transaction fees, the startup’s anonymous co-founder Alon said today on the Bankless podcast. 

Pump.fun has also said that token creator revenue sharing is coming soon to PumpSwap. 

Last week, Raydium told Blockworks that it’s launching its own memecoin launchpad called LaunchLab. Raydium is weathering the loss of pump.fun okay so far, and pump.fun memecoin volume has actually increased on the platform over the past week, per Blockworks Research. In the longer term, Raydium will need to find trading volume elsewhere as pump.fun volume moves exclusively to PumpSwap.

Unsurprisingly, the most popular pools on pump.fun’s AMM all contain memecoins. It also seems like some of the false volume accusations users have historically lobbed at Raydium may also apply to pump.fun. The aforementioned ballscoin and DOGEMOON have marginal market caps — and if the dashboard data is correct, then the volume is likely inorganic.

A Telegram channel with 28,000 monthly users offering a “Solana Volume Booster” announced that it had begun supporting PumpSwap, and it was offering a special deal: 10% off artificial volume boosts on the AMM.

— Jack Kubinec

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A-Tron-ishing:

For the first week since early December, Solana was not the top chain by real economic value — a Blockworks Research measure of demand to use a blockchain. 

Surprisingly, Solana wasn’t unseated by Ethereum but by Tron, the layer-1 founded by Justin Sun. How’s that for a narrative violation?

— Jack Kubinec

Japan has been a central character in crypto’s mythology from day one, starting with the chosen name of its pseudonymous creator.

More recently, it was one of the first major economies to legalize Bitcoin in 2017. In 2023, it became one of the earliest to implement stablecoin-specific legislation. Now, that framework is bearing fruit: Circle will launch USDC in Japan on March 26 through SBI Holdings, making it the first global stablecoin approved for use under the new rules. Binance Japan, bitbank and bitFlyer are preparing to list it next.

This is noteworthy for Solana since USDC accounts for 77% of the network’s stablecoin supply, per DeFiLlama.

Takeaway: Japan’s blend of regulatory clarity and cultural alignment with crypto ideals is back in focus. For teams building the next generation of compliant finance, it might be time to look east once again.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Brandon Timinsky, founder of zar.app