Power Shift of the Solana Ecosystem Meme Coin Launch Platform

In the Solana ecosystem, a competition for dominance among meme coin launch platforms is underway. The former king, Pump.fun, after a reign of a year and a half, was finally surpassed by the emerging platform LetsBONK on a weekend in July 2025.

LetsBONK has successfully defeated Pump.fun with 15,600 token issuance, a 49.8% market share, and 135 graduate tokens, compared to Pump.fun's 11,500 issuance and 40.9% market share. This marks the first time since January 2024 that Pump.fun has lost its dominant position on the Solana chain.

The Domination and Controversy of Pump.fun

Pump.fun was once the most successful meme coin launch platform in the Solana ecosystem. Its business model cleverly leveraged the frenzy surrounding meme coins to build an efficient yield system. Users must pay SOL as fuel when creating tokens, and when the token's market value exceeds a specific threshold "graduation", an additional transaction fee must be paid.

This mechanism has generated an astonishing 6.4 million SOL (approximately $780 million) in revenue for the platform over a year and a half, making it the second largest SOL seller in the Solana ecosystem, only behind FTX/Alameda. However, these massive gains have not been reinvested into the ecosystem, but rather continuously exchanged for USDC and flowed out.

The approach of Pump.fun has sparked dissatisfaction within the community. When its market share fell to 57.5%, the platform announced the launch of an ICO with a valuation of $4 billion, planning to issue a total of 1 trillion PUMP coins. This decision further intensified the community's discontent.

The Rise of LetsBONK

On April 26, 2025, the well-known meme coin BONK on Solana launched the LetsBONK.fun platform. This new platform quickly attracted a large number of users, drawing in 800,000 users within 24 hours of its launch, generating a trading volume of $300 million, and giving birth to 2,700 new tokens.

The success of LetsBONK stems from its innovative ecological feedback mechanism. The platform allocates 1% of the transaction fees to enhance network security, buy back and destroy BONK tokens, and support ecological development. In July 2025, the platform further committed to using 50% of its revenue to purchase and destroy BONK tokens, directly benefiting the community.

In addition, LetsBONK has also launched a creator economy revolution and developer incentive program. The platform's founders personally support high-quality projects and organize hackathons to attract innovative projects. This symbiotic concept has given rise to phenomenal projects such as Useless Coin.

Paradigm Shift

The rise of LetsBONK reflects several important changes happening in the crypto world:

1. Evolution of values from extraction to feedback: LetsBONK has built a token value return mechanism, deeply integrated with the Solana ecosystem.

2. Product Philosophy from Bubble to Flywheel: LetsBONK has built a multi-layered ecosystem, from meme assets to utility tokens, and then to technical solutions.

3. The Governance Revolution from Monopoly to Co-Governance: The closed rule of Pump.fun has given rise to multiple competitive platforms, forming a more decentralized competitive landscape.

Future Challenges

Despite the initial success of LetsBONK, its future still faces challenges. The platform token $LETSBONK has experienced a drop from a market value of $30 million to $4 million, showing that enthusiasm alone is not enough to sustain the ecosystem. On the other hand, Pump.fun has a cash reserve of $600 million and could launch a subsidy war at any time.

This competition is essentially a game between two routes of crypto-capitalism: the financialization route represented by Pump.fun and the ecological route represented by LetsBONK. The former attempts to achieve high-level cashing out through financial packaging, while the latter is dedicated to building a sustainable ecosystem and technological innovation.

Regardless of the outcome, this transformation marks a shift in the crypto world from a purely financial game to a direction that places greater emphasis on ecological construction and technological innovation. In this process, community consensus and value creation will become the key factors determining success or failure.