Less than three weeks ago, pump.fun had 99% of the Solana memecoin launchpad market. This week, down to 60%.
An ugly (or is it cute?) green lizard named Glonk is showing how pump.fun’s once absolute dominance of the Solana memecoin trade is slipping.
As recently as April 24, pump.fun’s market share of tokens deployed was almost 99%. This week, that dominance slipped down to near 60% as competing launchpads continue to gain traction.
Raydium’s LaunchLabs and Bonk’s Let’s BONK, which both launched in the second half of April, were neck and neck with about 7% market share last week. But as of this week, Let’s BONK gained as high as 30% market share on Monday, May 12, holding steady between 16-20% for the rest of the week.
What’s happening is best illustrated by a picture comedian Ricky Gervais posted on X on May 13 of Glonk, a character in his Flanimals book series.
Shortly thereafter, two different Glonk memecoins — of course, neither officially from Gervais — were launched on competing Solana memecoin launchpads pump.fun as well as Let’s BONK.
Who came first?
Let’s BONK was winning until X user Qwerty posted a screenshot of the two tokens with the Let’s BONK version at a market capitalization of $442,000 and pump.fun’s at $138,000. Qwerty said “A PUMPFUN JUST GOT VAMPED SUCCESFULLY BY A BONKFUN. REF DO SOMETHING.”
“Vamped” refers to a vampire attack, in which a new DeFi project incentivizes users of an existing platform to migrate their liquidity by offering more attractive rewards or incentives.
Which is when pump.fun founder Alon Cohen chimed in “send the OG” on X, suggesting that pump.fun was where buyers should turn to buy Glonk.
That in turn set off Let’s BONK founder @SolportTom, who said on X:
“Personal feelings aside, I saw people happy in our public trench group that there was a $3m runner doing well on our platform, then got linked the tweet saying go to the OG one and that imo is pretty lame. Let the market do their things naturally, winner was chosen no need to interject.”
He added, “If a coin is $3 million on BONK and the one on Pump was 170k and someone tweets out saying ‘Pump the og one’ that’s pretty low imo. People chose their winner already.”
The 24 hour volume peaked at $82 million for Let’s BONK and $56 million for pump.fun, according to Lookonchain.
Let’s BONK, the challenger
For all that, pump.fun is still far ahead on daily active users, with 147,078 in the past 24 hours, compared to less than 22,890 for Let’s BONK, per Dune data.
On other measures the two are closer, at least some days. On May 12, pump.fun graduated 195 tokens, which means that the tokens reached a certain market cap and became tradeable on a DEX. The same day, Let’s BONK graduated 178. Boop got 28 and LaunchLabs graduated 11 tokens.
But as of yesterday, May 15, pump.fun had more than twice the number of graduating tokens.
In terms of number of tokens launched, pump.fun is still the clear leader. In the past 24 hours, pump.fun saw a little over 19,300 tokens launched, compared to 4,756 for Let’s BONK.
Altogether, the numbers show that thought pump.fun is still the go-to Solana memecoin launchpad, Let’s BONK is emerging as a challenger.
Last week, Solidus Labs released a report that said that almost 99% of memecoin launches on pump.fun are rug pulls or pump-and-dump schemes.
Today, pump.fun’s founder teased a new community takeover feature for revenue share, just a few days after the launchpad kicked off creator revenue sharing.
#Ricky #Gervais #Glonk #Memecoin #Shows #Pump.funs #Dominance #Slipping
