Author: Arain, ChainCatcher
According to Dune Analytics data, Pump.Fun has generated a total revenue of approximately $99.74 million since March 1 this year. A super small team of only three people has generated nearly $100 million in revenue in about half a year.
Retail investors cheered for the wealth effect on Pump.Fun, and Pump.Fun's competitors ambitiously joined the Meme Launchpad feast. With TRON founder Justin Sun announcing that TRON will support the first fair launch and trading meme coin platform "SunPump" in the ecosystem, the MemeCoin carnival seemed to have entered the second half.
Faced with the emergence of Pump.Fun competitors in the market, more investment institutions and investors remain on the sidelines.
“We don’t invest because the cycle is too short. If the platform itself makes money, it generally won’t issue platform coins, because once it does, it will be close to death.” An investment institution that requested anonymity said bluntly in an interview with ChainCatcher.
Justin Sun also pointed out the market reality when he was interviewed by ChainCatcher. He said that nothing can create exciting narratives in a short period of time better than Memes, and TRON hopes to inject new vitality into the stagnant market.
Of course, "new transmitters will divert existing funds," said Justin Sun.
Meme Launchpads emerge in droves, investors mostly wait and see
It is no exaggeration to say that this year’s cryptocurrency market is the “Summer of Meme.” In the “Crypto Narrative” section of Dune Analytics, Meme is the narrative concept with the highest volume.
Pump.Fun, as the name suggests, is a huge pump on Solana: while constantly creating phenomenal meme projects that become popular overnight for the market, it is also bringing fun to market participants in today’s market that lacks volatility.
"You can't imagine how big this market is. Meme has a strong wealth-creating effect and a low threshold for participation. For individual users, there is a narrative temptation of turning things around. If it sinks enough, a larger user group will come. Pump.Fun is like Uniswap back then, and the stories of Uniswap and SushiSwap will definitely be repeated. The Meme Launchpad sector will not always be dominated by Pump.Fun alone." A Meme community leader said that the community is still in preparation and is ready to snipe Meme coins together with some upcoming new Meme Launchpads.
In the summer of DeFi, Uniswap was unique. It only cost tens of dollars to issue and list coins on Uniswap. In particular, the one-click liquidity function allowed it to bypass centralized exchanges and be seen and traded by users. This led to Uniswap becoming a paradise for altcoins and dogecoins. This is similar to what Pump.Fun is doing today. Later, Sushiswap emerged and was once on par with Uniswap.
Even Alon, the anonymous founder of Pump.Fun, said in a live broadcast that Pump.Fun is imitating the joint curve transaction of Uniswap V2 to provide participants with a similar trading experience.
But Alon did not invent the joint curve, his focus was on creating a fair release platform for content creators and speculators. He believes that Pump.fun's joint curve requires about 3 to 5K liquidity balance to imitate the best LP (liquidity provider) release.
In fact, it is precisely because of the pursuit of "fairness" that Pump.fun has always been able to sit firmly in the top spot.
Makenow.meme, a competitor of Pump.fun, was popular in the Meme Launchpad market for a while. The product simplified the process of users sending Memecoin to just sending a tweet, but its rules obviously favored KOLs, Degen players, scientists, etc., which was not "fair". In addition, it violated X's rules, and the official account was frozen by X for a period of time. Makenow.meme was eventually lost in the noise.
Although many of Pump.fun's competitors eventually failed, the market is still waiting for projects that can compete with Pump.Fun. A more appropriate way of saying it is to take a piece of Pump.Fun's pie.
According to RootData data and ChainCatcher compilation, according to incomplete statistics, since 2024, there have been more than 10 new Meme Launchpad projects or projects with Meme Launchpad functions, supporting different public chains, with the most Meme Launchpad projects supporting Base and Solana.
This may be due to the relatively low operating costs on these two public chains, but Alon, the anonymous founder of Pump.Fun, believes that the culture and ecology of the public chains also have an impact on this.
During a live broadcast, he specifically mentioned Solana and Base. He believes that Solana has a unique and authentic culture that is closely intertwined with anonymous memes. Base is different from Solana, has more cryptocurrencies, and focuses on community building.
Although the market has high expectations for the new Meme Launchpad to be a “latecomer to the top”, and ChainCatcher has learned that several similar projects have just started recently and are seeking financing, most investment institutions in the market are taking a wait-and-see attitude.
Justin Sun told ChainCatcher: “The rest of the altcoin capital is still in flight. The current market narrative is popular, and the hype has been completed. A large number of projects have failed to achieve subsequent milestones, and the poor token economic model has caused losses. At this time of market downturn, TRON chose to re-ignite the meme fire, hoping to inject new vitality into the stagnant market through TRON’s efforts and promotion.
“There are many memecoin launch platforms on various public chains now, and most institutions are taking a wait-and-see attitude. Since asset issuance and asset trading have very mature business models, we do not pin our hopes on institutional investment. Instead, we generate positive cash flow through self-financing to achieve a healthy business model.” said Jill, head of MemeFun.
Jill introduced that MemeFun is currently the first memecoin launch platform in the ICP (Dfinity) ecosystem. The team had previously worked on an inscription trading market and owned leading inscription platforms in multiple public chain ecosystems. It had received investment from Binance Capital and transformed itself into a meme launch platform in the middle of this year.
"In the end, there was no universal consensus on inscriptions. Compared with the inscription asset class, Meme assets have a longer life cycle. After several rounds of bull and bear cycles, they still often radiate new vitality, and have formed a global consensus in a broad sense. The cultural attributes of meme mean broad dissemination and lasting vitality. Therefore, as the market buying switched in this cycle, we chose the memecoin launcher track." Jill explained their views on the Meme track, which is also the reason why they transformed and entered this track.
Capital is trying to enter the market
As the interviewee mentioned above said, most of the capital is in a wait-and-see state, but there are also projects that have obtained financial support.
According to RootData, four projects, Memehub.AI, Trugly.meme, We.Rich and STIX, have currently received funding.
After sorting out, ChainCatcher found that the biggest common feature of these four projects that received funding is that they are not just Meme Launchpad. Some are upgraded versions of Meme Launchpad, and some are Meme Launchpad +.
For example, Memehub.AI belongs to Meme Launchpad + AI. As the winning project in Binance Hackathon, Memehub.AI has received support from Binance Incubator. This is an AI-driven Meme coin launch platform that allows users to generate Meme coin-related concepts, including names, logos, introductions, and posters, with one sentence or one keyword. It can also create multi-mechanism Meme coins at a very low cost and can be traded without providing liquidity. The project will support the deployment of multiple public chains.
Both We.Rich and Trugly.meme have the social label, but looking at the products at this stage, they can also be said to be upgraded versions of Meme Launchpad.
We.Rich received a $2 million seed round of financing on July 31, led by Folius Ventures and Animoca Brands.
The platform positions itself as a UGA, or user-generated asset platform, rather than a Meme Launchpad. Its slogan is "Anyone can be a founder", and anyone can issue Memecoin without an LP. After issuance, the created Memecoin will enter the "seed round" fundraising progress. When the fundraising progress is completed, the platform will incentivize the creator with a 0.1ETH reward. If you choose to buy a portion of the Memecoin while issuing it, the creator can also extract the transaction fee of the corresponding Memecoin. The platform is deployed on Base, and currently using the Coinbase wallet, you can achieve 0-cost one-click issuance of memecoin.
There are certain similarities between the rules of Trugly.meme and We.Rich. The platform received investment from Gm Capital on April 25, which also invested in Movement. This is a platform for issuing, trading and discovering memecoin on Base. Users can issue MEME404 and standard memecoin for free in less than 6 seconds. Although memes can be issued for free, there are also fundraising goals. They will only go online after the fundraising goals are completed, otherwise a refund will be made. After the fundraising is completed, meme will be officially launched, and creators can allocate up to 50%, but there are 1 month lock-up period and 1 year vesting period requirements. In addition, Trugly.meme also supports MEME404, a protocol that allows memecoin holders to display their balances through unique NFTs, thereby unlocking different levels or "tiers" and realizing the classification of meme holders.
As for STIX, it is different from the previous three projects. It is a derivative project of Stickerly, one of the world's largest Web2 user-generated content sticker publishing platforms. Web3 STIX uses Stickerly's distribution platform to issue token incentives by regularly holding emoji popularity contests and vigorously promotes it on STIX and Stickerly, so it is actually a traffic-generating project.
The project completed a $1.8 million private round of financing on July 26, with dozens of crypto KOLs participating in the investment, including Presto Labs, Selini Capital, Mythos Group, and Altcoin Sherpa. The funds will be used to prepare for the Beta version release and token issuance of STIX.
New troublemakers and PumpFun seeking change
The Meme Launchpad that has completed financing is the VC Meme Launchpad. The Meme Launchpad that has not received financing does not mean that it is not worthy of attention - the current leader of Meme Launchpad, PumpFun, has not received financing.
But on July 18, the DeFi protocol Burve Protocol officially announced that it would acquire PumpFun at a valuation of US$50 million.
Perhaps due to the progress of the acquisition or the stimulation of market competitors, pump.fun announced two major changes (beta version) on August 9:
1. Free token issuance. Token creators no longer need to pay the cost of about $2 to create a token, but it is paid by the first buyer of the token. (Note: This unlocks the use case where someone creates a token but does not buy any tokens).
2. If a token completes its Bonding curve, the creator will receive 0.5 SOL ($80). This fee is paid from the pump.fun migration fee (now only 1.5 SOL); it will be paid to the token developer regardless of whether they have ever held the token or still hold the token; the reward also encourages all developers to increase their token allocation share to 100%.
Shortly after this change was introduced, SunPump launched its Beta version on August 13, breaking the monopoly of pump.fun.
Judging from ChainCatcher’s recent interview with Justin Sun (the original interview can be searched on the ChainCatcher official website), Sun Pump advocates the principles of fair issuance and fair trading, and also allows creators to issue coins with one click in a convenient and extremely low-cost manner. Like PumpFun, it uses a joint curve pricing mechanism.
However, the difference is that as the first Meme Launchpad supported by the TRON ecosystem, SunPump enjoys TRON’s traffic support, gas subsidies, and a tens of millions of dollars incentive plan.
According to Dune data and data revealed by Justin Sun on social media, Sun Pump Beta version has been online for about a week and its daily revenue has exceeded Pump.Fun, and its traffic has reached 30%-40% of Pump.Fun.
“In the first week of the launch, the number of projects created exceeded 10,000, and the revenue reached 4.36 million TRX, which shows that the platform has achieved good economic benefits in a short period of time. In a decentralized manner, we use the protocol revenue to repurchase and destroy SUN tokens to provide long-term value feedback to protocol participants. This mechanism not only enhances users’ confidence in the platform, but also contributes to the sustainable development of the platform.” Justin Sun told ChainCatcher.
There is a view that the rise of SunPump came at the expense of Pump.Fun's traffic loss, which is somewhat similar to the vampire attack launched by SushiSwap on Uniswap.
In Sun Yuchen’s opinion, it is not easy for the new Meme Launchpad to stand out and gain a foothold.
“Under the current relatively depressed investment sentiment, new launchers will divert existing funds. Latecomers will find it difficult to survive without sustained economic incentives and innovative gameplay. If you want to bring incremental growth, the platform needs to have sufficiently low launch costs, deep enough liquidity and even trading flexibility. Looking at the entire industry ecosystem, there are not many teams that can meet the above three points at the same time to be a launcher.”
It should be pointed out that Sun Pump is based on the TRON ecosystem, and Pump.Fun is based on the Solana ecosystem. ALone pointed out during the live broadcast that different public chain ecosystems have different cultures, and culture is crucial for projects that aim to serve a large user base. Meme itself is a unique cultural phenomenon that can be used as an abbreviation for ideas or communities, "just like the example of Dogecoin and Elon Musk."
In addition, Alon also mentioned that he had doubts about Blast because the chain was developing rapidly but lacked substantive content and was too focused on economic interests, making it more difficult for good projects to gain attention on the chain.
“Blockchains with unique projects and strong culture will succeed in the long run.” Alone shared his views.
Jill also believes that the cultural attribute is necessary, and introduced the ecological culture of ICP. "Chinese people are relatively unfamiliar with the ICP ecosystem, but it is a relatively interesting ecosystem in Europe and the United States. The characteristic of memes on ICP is a geeky fun. Like the memes on Solana, there are many memes worth hundreds of millions of dollars that only have one picture at the beginning and the same picture at the end. Some memes on ICP, such as EXE, combine the Windows 98 interface with meme to create a retro product that enters different applications through the desktop of the last century. For example, Motoko uses the programming language on ICP as the logo of the meme, and also builds a developer community. This geeky meme is one step closer to a simple capital game." This is the reason why MemeFun chose the ICP ecosystem.
As for TRON, Sun Yuchen positioned it as a global digital content entertainment system at the beginning of its establishment, but for a long time in the past, TRON's ecosystem was dominated by stablecoins, thus forming its initial positioning as a payment public chain. After following the trend and launching Sun Pump and shaking up PumpFun, and achieving certain results, the ecosystem pattern on TRON is changing.
"Culture is everything." This is Alone's summary of the live broadcast.
Alone also shared a trend he has observed recently, that is, one of the trends in the development of Meme is towards NFT, but Meme is different from NFT, NFT requires a deeper cultural resonance and is a more complex product. He is excited about this trend.