Raydium introduces Pump.fun equivalent, response from industry mixed

Raydium has debuted LaunchLab, a platform inspired by Pump.fun with distinct pricing attributes, causing a rift in the crypto world.

Raydium has introduced LaunchLab, a fresh stage for generating and introducing tokens that has similarities to Solana's Pump.fun, as initially reported by Blockworks. LaunchLab, powered by Raydium (RAY), is essentially a Pump.fun replica but offers more advanced features. LaunchLab differentiates itself from Pump.fun by enabling users to decide on the pricing shift as the token's demand increases. The price modification course can be established as linear, exponential, or logarithmic. Furthermore, third-party interfaces can merge with LaunchLab and impose their own transaction fees on top of the default fees.

An unidentified Raydium developer informed Blockworks that LaunchLab has been in progress for several months, but the company hesitated to introduce it to avoid appearing as a direct rival to Pump.fun and other launchpads.

However, Raydium altered its strategy and decided to unveil LaunchLab following Pump.fun's announcement to release its own AMM, although the developer clarified that LaunchLab is not aimed at replacing Pump.fun or any other launchpad. The platform is intended to aid teams in creating and managing their tokens without starting from scratch.

Despite Raydium's LaunchLab not positioning itself as a direct competitor to Pump.fun, the timing is questionable. It appears that Raydium is attempting to safeguard its revenue stream as Pump.fun has been directing a significant amount of its trading activity to Raydium, resulting in substantial profits from trading fees.

When a Pump.fun-generated token achieves a market cap of $69,000, a portion of its liquidity is automatically transferred to a Raydium trading pool and subsequently burned. This renders those tokens permanently unavailable, thereby increasing the value of the remaining tokens. This mechanism has contributed to 41% of Raydium's swap revenue in the last month, according to Blockworks Research.

The announcement received mixed reactions, with Zhu Su's tweet encapsulating the sentiment. He noted that fee compression is favorable for users but emphasized that community and lore are the driving forces behind projects like Pump.fun, implying that these aspects will be more challenging for Raydium to replicate.

Raydium's token RAY has increased by 12% on the daily timeframe, indicating positive reception to the news.

My viewpoint on the pump versus raydium conflict:

1) Raydium has been a cornerstone of the Solana ecosystem for multiple years. Raydium has proven itself as reliable Solana DeFi infrastructure and outperformed several other AMMs at the time.

2) Pump has initiated a new era for memecoins. Pump's strength lies in the…