RAY Up 13% As Raydium Creates LaunchLab To Rival Pump.Fun On Solana

Raydium, Solana’s leading decentralized exchange (DEX ) and automated market maker (AMM), is launching LaunchLab, a new token launchpad.

This move positions it as a competitor to Pump.fun, though with expanded features. LaunchLab integrates Raydium’s liquidity lockers and offers dynamic pricing models that adjust based on demand.

Unlike Pump.fun, LaunchLab follows a structure closer to Fjord Foundry, supporting linear, exponential, and logarithmic pricing models. These models influence how token prices evolve over time based on market activity. Additionally, LaunchLab allows third-party interfaces to set their own fees, giving users more flexibility.

Development on LaunchLab has been underway for months, though Raydium had kept the project undisclosed. A core contributor, @0xINFRA, confirmed that LaunchLab is just one of several initiatives the platform is building. He emphasized that this is not meant to replace Pump.fun but to provide more options for projects launching on Solana.

Competition with Pump.fun

LaunchLab’s introduction follows recent developments around Pump.fun, which is working on its own AMM. This shift signals a break from its previous reliance on Raydium’s liquidity pools. As part of its operations, Pump.fun currently deposits liquidity into Raydium pools for tokens that hit a $69,000 market cap before burning them.

Pump.fun’s memecoins have generated significant revenue for Raydium, accounting for 41% of its swap fee income over the past 30 days.

However, concerns about declining revenue have impacted Raydium’s native token, RAY, which fell 25% in February after reports of Pump.fun’s in-house AMM surfaced.

Raydium still maintains a $168million balance sheet, which gives it room to move quickly on new projects like LaunchLab. Sources within Raydium indicated that they initially held off on launching this platform to avoid direct competition with existing projects. However, following news of Pump.fun’s AMM, that stance changed.

Market reaction and RAY price movement

Following reports of LaunchLab’s launch, RAY surged by 30%, climbing from $1.60 to just over $2 before retracing to $1.81, marking a 13.3% daily gain.

Trading volume also saw a sharp increase, exceeding $250m in the past 24 hours. This is a fivefold jump compared to the $49m and $59m recorded on 16 and 17 March, according to CoinGecko.

Raydium’s move to introduce LaunchLab signals an effort to adapt to shifting market dynamics and retain a strong position within Solana’s expanding DeFi ecosystem. Whether LaunchLab will challenge Pump.fun’s dominance remains to be seen, but the competition is heating up.