As 2024 comes to a close, every Web3 crypto enthusiast has their own annual keyword. For the author, this year's keyword should be 'highlight' and 'lost'. Solana has made a strong recovery after the FTX crash; Base's user growth surged; the TON ecosystem matrix is eye-catching; the AI Agent track is considered the focus of 2025; unfortunately: the BTC ecosystem construction and coin price have far from reached the market expectations for 2024, while ETH remains sluggish. Nevertheless, this year's MEME track and the explosion of new assets have activated a massive carnival of on-chain liquidity and spanned most of 2024.
2024—The new MEME asset is 'the self-redemption of retail investors.'
Trends are undergoing profound changes: 'The narrative of capital is gradually losing effectiveness.' With the evolution of Web3 sovereignty consciousness, a series of new launch protocols, such as Friend.tech, Pump.Fun, Four.meme, Moonshot, Flap, We.RICH, etc., are triggering a brand new Paradigm Shift. These protocols lower the barriers to entry, allowing everyone to become project initiators, thus bringing more opportunities and choices.
This wave of trends has not only spawned a large number of 'highlight' market cap projects (such as: Wif, Bonk, Bome, Mew, etc.), but has also made MEME assets the main theme throughout much of 2024, sweeping the market with exponential growth. MEME assets are gradually becoming the core carrier of decentralized value flow, projected from emotions and culture.
However, the increase in choices also comes with a loss of direction. Countless hundred-fold tokens and new assets with tens of millions of market cap opportunities make it easier for us to 'get lost' in information overload, not only missing potential wealth opportunities but also neglecting deep thinking about the core value assets of Web3. This 'noise effect' makes the market prone to indulge in short-term speculation while ignoring the key to long-term sustainable development of the ecology: strengthening value creation and user consensus.
The 'highlight' market cap behind the MEME track is driven by 'Bonding Curve'.
Bonding Curve is an algorithmic mechanism of AMM automated market makers. Most people encounter AMM in the traditional market-making mechanism of Uniswap (x⋅y=k), where the K constant is the supply of two tokens and the price of coins always realizes value equivalence. Traditional AMM needs to establish a bottom pool to obtain supply relationship parameters, while the Bonding Curve mechanism adopted by PumpFun, Friend.teach, Four.meme, Moonshot, and Flap can carry out low-cost asset issuance without needing to build a bottom pool, without liquidity crises, without permanent loss, and even without worrying about liquidity providers draining the pool and running away.
More importantly, Bonding Curve provides higher efficiency and flexibility, allowing for diversified customization of supply and value relationships through linear, logarithmic, exponential, inverse, and mixed curves. For example: Friend.teach (y = x^2 / 16000) essentially determines the appreciation space for minted tokens.
In the pricing system of Pump.FUN, a virtual pool named virtualSolReserves is set up. This virtual pool initially contains 30 SOL and 1,073,000,191 tokens, and its pricing formula follows the constant product rule x * y = k. After fitting and calculating data, the initial k value is 32,190,005,730, and the initial price of each token is approximately 0.000000028 SOL.
The pricing formula is as follows: y=1073000191−3219000573030+xy = 1073000191 - \frac{32190005730}{30 + x}y=1073000191−30+x32190005730
（The content and images related to the Pump.FUN formula calculation are from Binance Square 'Random Madman Chen Nezha' https://www.binance.com/zh-CN/square/post/15600492237666）
https://www.binance.com/zh-CN/square/post/15600492237666）
Essentially, Pump.FUN still adheres to the pricing principle of x * y = k. This is also the reason why it can seamlessly add liquidity in Ratdium when completing 69,000 USD, which means that the deposited minted SOL quantity reaches 85, and then start the next round of peak sprint.
Coincidentally, Four.meme, backed by Binance, also achieves similar processes through Bonding Curve. As long as the market cap reaches 44,444 USD, the platform will add badge display, and when the Bounding curve reaches 100%, it will go live on PancakeSwap. However, under Binance's 'resource moat', Four.meme provides a KOL matrix and promotional resources along with expected airdrop points for more community assets, once again enhancing user stickiness.
The duality of Bonding Curve: casino tool or value engine?
Whether it’s Pump.FUN or Four.meme, the process of reaching market cap standards to migrate to DEX for liquidity utilizes the predictability of Bonding Curve, so that most market investors can clearly understand the pressure points of the asset, which indeed gives a bit of a 'zero-sum game' feeling; in other words, it's about 'who runs faster.'
But the author believes: The essence of finance lies in cyclical patterns. There are no assets that rise forever; Bonding Curve is just part of the tool. It makes the market more transparent and calculable, while forcing project initiators to think about the full-chain operation from asset issuance to ecological application and then to value realization.
Although many launch protocols have created very high protocol revenues, Pump.FUN's total revenue has exceeded 300 million USD, but the survival rate of tokens launched through it is only 1.3%. Perhaps we should think more about where these assets should ultimately go? What kind of financial value should they play?
2025 is the best time for innovation in the Web3 bull market.
The author believes: Every new asset issuance comes with enormous wealth opportunities. The birth of BTC opened the era of digital assets, followed by an endless stream of innovations such as altcoins, NFTs, and DeFi, creating countless wealth myths. However, the sustainable development of assets is key to long-term success. Now, the sixth digital asset revolution—Bonding Curve—has arrived.
The future applications of Bonding Curve will no longer be limited to asset issuance and trading, but will extend to new asset combinations, lending optimization, liquidity management, and capital efficiency enhancement. Just as the last DeFi bull market spurred a comprehensive prosperity in the industry, in 2025 we are likely to witness a new battlefield in DeFi led by Bonding Curve.
