Raydium is launching its own version of pump.fun

The platform, called LaunchLab, comes less than a month after news broke that pump.fun was developing an AMM of its own

article-image

Raydium and Adobe stock modified by Blockworks

share


This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.


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.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Unlocked by Template (10).png

Research

Innovations on Aptos’ technical design through Raptr, Shardines, and Zaptos approach near-optimal latency and throughput by unlocking 100% utilization of network resources, with the capacity to settle 260k transactions per second with latencies less than 800ms. The original Move language was revamped with the launch of Move 2, supporting more expressivity in smart contract logic and a scalable ability to interact with high volume datasets. The ecosystem has benefitted from strong asset inflows, now hosting over $1.3B in stablecoins, $450M in bridged BTC, and $530M in RWAs. Activity in the Aptos ecosystem has grown notably over the past year, with monthly application revenue reaching ~$835k and monthly DEX volumes growing to over $5B, both at new all time highs.

article-image

Interchain Labs will focus on sovereign L1s and institutional demand, abandoning plans for smart contracts on the Cosmos Hub

article-image

Also, only three tokens have outperformed bitcoin so far this year: XMR, HYPE and SKY

article-image

The fund group has submitted proposals in recent months for other funds that would hold litecoin, solana, XRP, HBAR, Sui and others

article-image

Momentum’s back — BTC leads, risk assets follow

article-image

Ondo Finance’s acquisition of blockchain development company Strangelove follows its buy of Oasis Pro

article-image

Cryptocurrency and stock traders alike had a lot to unpack Wednesday