Howdy!

We have a shorter edition today as I’m at the Blockworks Digital Asset Summit doing some hobnobbing and schmoozing. 

Today, we’ve got the exclusive on Raydium’s pump.fun fork and Jeff’s take on that Solana ad.

Raydium is launching its own version of pump.fun

The Solana DEX and automated market maker Raydium is launching a token launchpad that will initially resemble a direct fork of pump.fun, Blockworks has learned exclusively.

The release of the platform, which is named LaunchLab, comes less than a month after news broke that the wildly popular Solana memecoin launchpad pump.fun was developing an AMM of its own, essentially severing an unofficial partnership it had struck with Raydium. LaunchLab will offer linear, exponential and logarithmic bonding curves that match demand and price for a token. It will also let third party UIs set their own fees.

Pump.fun tokens that reach a market cap of $69,000 have some liquidity deposited into a Raydium trading pool and burned. Pump.fun memecoins made up 41% of Raydium’s swap fee revenue over the past 30 days, according to Blockworks Research. Raydium’s native token crashed 25% in February as investors expect a major drawdown in Raydium revenue once pump.fun begins migrating tokens to pump’s in-house AMM. 

Even after the flash crash, Raydium still holds some $168 million on its balance sheet, per Blockworks Research. The nice thing about having a big war chest is it allows a company to move quickly on things like suddenly building a pump.fun fork — though for what it’s worth, pump.fun’s in-house AMM had bounced around the Solana rumor mill for some time before the news leaked.

Anonymous Raydium core contributor Infra told me the protocol began developing LaunchLab “several months ago” but kept the project shelved because it “didn’t want teams to feel Raydium was competing with them directly.” That magnanimity appears to have dried up after pump.fun’s AMM plans emerged.

Raydium believes pump.fun found product-market fit partly because of Raydium’s infrastructure, Infra told me. But although they think Raydium’s liquidity pools could be a draw for users, Infra didn’t cast LaunchLab as a pump.fun killer.

“LaunchLab isn’t about replacing Pump or any other platform — it’s an alternative for teams who don’t want to develop their own programs from scratch, and for Pump users who prefer Raydium’s AMM v4 for pool migrations,” Infra wrote in a text message.

Besides offering novel bonding curves and flexible fees, LaunchLab will also support multiple quote tokens besides SOL and will integrate with Raydium’s liquidity provider locker, which lets issuers secure swap fees for tokens in perpetuity. LaunchLab is the first piece of a broader “suite of tools” that Raydium is pushing out for token creation, Infra said.

— Jack Kubinec

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Woof. If eye-rolls could kill. Solana’s latest ad campaign was pulled within nine hours after its attempt at humor backfired in spectacular fashion. The video, meant to hype up the Accelerate conference, leaned into exhausting culture-war bait with lines like "I want to invent technologies, not genders!" and "Numbers are non-binary." Which…wait. What? Is the joke the joke? Or is the absence of a joke the joke? I digress.

I’d love to know how this ad got its green light — from idea to publication. I get the pseudo-rationalization that your team won (though asset prices across the entire industry disagree), so now you’re above criticism. But you really shouldn’t show so much of a mirror to your intended audience. You end up not punching up, or punching down, but instead punching yourself, full-circle, in the face. Repeatedly. For two minutes and 24 seconds. Absolute cinema.

The ad pretty impressively seems to have landed with no one. It offended liberals by belittling their feelings-heavy soy boy politics. It left conservatives splenetic over how much it makes them look like angry manlet cringe lords. It triggered old-school cypherpunks watching their once-neutral magic internet money get hijacked by sociopolitical dumb-dumbs. I mean, truly, it was a masterstroke of ill humor. Bravissimo, nerds. Bravissimo!

Takeaway: Call me an [insert your pejorative of choice here], but I don't understand what the difference between ironic edgy humor and actual prejudice is. Because I don't think there is one. That being said, while it’s embarrassing to see what an industry built on beautifully agnostic technology has devolved into, the backlash from quite literally all sides does offer the smallest, Satoshi-sized sliver of optimism.

— Jeffrey Albus

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