In the early morning of April 26, Solana's old meme coin BONK announced the release of its own LaunchPad - LetsBonk.fun, and the market responded with "LetsBONK!". In just 24 hours, it created 800,000 visitors, 300 million transactions, and 2,700 tokens were created, of which more than 70 were successfully launched. The eponymous token Let's BONK soared to a market value of 30 million US dollars in 6 hours, and the Internet celebrity cat Hosico also reached a market value of 30 million US dollars. The BONK community OGs each led the concept tokens to blossom in multiple places.
There are so many projects that release LaunchPad, why does BONK have such great power? After the initial climax, is BONK a flash in the pan or will it continue to gain momentum?
BONK’s Position in the Solana Ecosystem
When it comes to BONK, many people's first impression is the "yellow Shiba Inu logo" and the second impression is the "Saga phone airdrop". Tracing back to the source, this yellow Shiba Inu is the first contributor to the sales of Solana phones. When Solana launched the Solana phone, it wanted to create an ecosystem. The first step was to issue the phone, but the focus was to create a crypto-first app store so that crypto participants would not be constrained by the Apple and Google ecosystems.
But at the beginning, the sales volume of the phone was only 20-30 units per day, and even after the promotion, the sales volume only reached 50-60 units. It might take several years to sell 20,000 phones. When Toly participated in Laura Shin’s podcast, he admitted that he only sold 2,500 Saga phones, but just three days later, they sold 15,000 units in just one day. At this time, Saga’s airdrop BONK was several times the price of the phone. Through the airdrop BONK, a new model was created, connecting physical products and ecology through a Memecoin.
Toly said in an interview with Bankless, “I think Solana developers and NFT developers are two groups. There are some overlaps between them, but obviously they are two different types of developers, and BONK connects the two. The mobile phone becomes an NFT, and the holder of BONK has to pay attention to the ecosystem of mobile applications.”
Two years have passed in the blink of an eye, and BONK has continued to build the Solana ecosystem for two years. Whether it is DeFi, GameFi, developer community or application intermediary, he has built more than 10 applications and integrated $BONK into more than 100 ecosystems. When the Solana ecosystem needs to start a LaunchPad war, he came again with LetsBonk.fun.
LetsBONK!
LaunchPad Mechanism
A few hours after BONK officially released the four major community guidelines of READ "Reduce Supply, Expand Awareness, Accelerate Adoption, Drive Revenue", BONK launched LetsBONK.Fun, implementing the "Accelerate Adoption" policy. "It's not enough to talk about $BONK, it needs to be used" is also true.
The transaction fee of BONK platform is 1%, part of which will be verified by BONKSOL nodes, and part of which will be used to repurchase and destroy $BONK, which also achieves "Reduce Supply". As soon as the platform was launched, it received support from a number of project parties and OG community in the Solana ecosystem. Dex leader Jupiter, encrypted "Paypay" MoonPay, OG community MonkeDAO "SMB community", Solana founder Toly and other core circle figures have "sent congratulatory messages to LetsBonk".
What coins does LetsBONK have?
DUMPFUN
Within a few hours after LaunchPad was released, three tokens emerged and formed a three-way competition. DumpFun, the first token deployed, reached a market value of $6 million within three hours with its first-mover advantage. However, as other tokens became stronger, Ticker, which was not suitable for speculation, fell behind, and its market value has almost dropped to $80,000.
LETSBONK
LetsBONK is a meme with the same name as the platform LetsBonk.fun. This is why the market identified it as the second best, even though it did not have a particularly high market value at the beginning. After the first wave reached a market value of $500,000, it was sucked by the popular DumpFun and returned to a market value of $100,000. As DumpFun's K-line continued to weaken, and more and more KOLs, project parties, and community OGs shouted the slogan "LetsBonk", the market's attention returned to $LETSBONK, which opened low and ended high, and soared to a market value of $30 million within 6 hours. This is also the first "hundred-fold coin" that LetsBONK.fun has hit after its issuance. As of press time, it has now adjusted back to a market value of $10 million.
HOSICO
Hosico was originally a cute cat with 1.8 million followers on Instagram. The Hosico issued on BONK is a Hosico in the style of Ghibli AI. It suddenly launched after 4 a.m. and soared to a market value of 10 million US dollars within an hour. It was not affected by the rise and fall of other tokens and developed an independent trend among the BONK platform tokens, reaching a market value of 23 million US dollars at its highest. It is currently priced at 10 million US dollars.
NOM
NOM is the founder of the OG community MonkeDAO and the fitness app MoonWalk, and is also one of the core members/sponsors of BONK. The community generally has positive comments on it. After a roller coaster ride of a market value of $5 million and $900,000, NOM himself posted a tweet thanking the participants of $NOM and said that he was considering the application of this token in the future. The token price then soared to a market value of $3.5 million, and the current offer has returned to $1.5 million. Like LetsBONK, it also has a "community slogan" - "Trust in Nom".
PumpFun Against the World
As of April, in just one and a half years, Pumpfun has sold 3.403 million Sols (about 629 million US dollars), becoming the second largest seller after FTX/Alameda, the former supporter of Solana. Before the emergence of Pump AMM, it only troubled the Solana Foundation and retail investors, but after establishing its own DEX, its ambition to monopolize the upstream and downstream is obvious. DEX began to get nervous, and so far "the world has suffered from PumpFun for a long time" has penetrated into every aspect of the ecosystem.
Even so, dozens of projects, big and small, such as Jupiter, Raydium, Meteora, and Virtuals, have launched LaunchPads one after another, but all have received mediocre responses. Facing so many commercial competitors, PumpFun's terrifying market share in LaunchPad and the frequency of shipping Sol give people a feeling of "you are not happy with me but you can't get rid of me".
Meteora once did something similar to what Raydium is doing now, which is to propose the SDK strategy, attempting to slowly erode PumpFun's market share with the human sea tactics, but it did not succeed and the results were not significant. Raydium obviously understands the heart of the chain Degen better. As a former "good partner" of PumpFun, after PumpFun chose not to launch graduated tokens on Raydium in February, Raydium lost a large part of its transaction fee income.
Two months later, they were fully prepared. They first sent out cook.meme to test the market. After "cooking" two MemeCoins with a market value of tens of millions of dollars, "Time and Symmetra" lost their subsequent market momentum and settled for a while. They then detonated the market again through LetsBONK. Coincidentally, the first avatar on the promotional picture of cook.meme when it was launched was BONK's.
Cook.meme launch promotional image
Currently, Raydium's LaunchLab has integrated 6 platforms and launched trading reward tasks to encourage users to trade directly on Raydium. LaunchLab has also achieved initial results in terms of trading volume, but its subsequent development still needs to be tracked and observed.
Now LaunchPad and DEX market has formed a trend of multiple players, and everyone wants to compete for this tempting cake. Raydium seems to have planned to fight against Pumpfun's "single brand" monopoly model through a "multi-brand" war. The result is still unknown. I just hope that more retail investors can benefit from this war and liquidity will return to the market. However, in the current market situation, "cash is king", and I hope all readers will also do a good job of fund management when looking for opportunities in the market.
