In the bloody world of Solana ecology, Pump.fun once sat on the throne.
This meme coin launch platform earned $7 million a day at its peak, and raked in $677 million in revenue in a year and a half, which is equivalent to draining $1.2 million of blood from the Solana ecosystem every day.
However, when it was indulging in the feast of capital, a sharp blade called LetsBONK had quietly stabbed into its heart.
This weekend in July 2025, history was rewritten - LetsBONK crushed Pump.fun's 11,500 token issuances with 15,600, overturned the former's 40.9% dominance with a 49.8% market share, and announced the arrival of a new era with 135 graduated tokens.
This is the first time Pump.fun has lost the Solana chain crown since January 2024, and a bloody coronation is being played out in real time on the blockchain.
1. Vampire Throne: Pump.fun’s original sin of ruling
Pump.fun’s business model is the most sophisticated wealth harvester in the crypto world.
It cleverly uses the carnival mood of meme coins to build an impeccable blood-sucking system: every time a user creates a token on the platform, he or she must pay SOL as fuel; when the token's market value exceeds a certain threshold and "graduates", he or she must pay transaction fees.
This mechanism sucked away 6.4 million SOL (worth $780 million) in a year and a half, making it the second largest seller in the Solana ecosystem after FTX/Alameda.
What is even more outrageous is that these huge profits are not returned to the ecosystem, but are continuously converted into USDC and flowed out, like a never-ending wealth pump.
This greed reaches its peak in June 2025.
When its market share was eroded to 57.5% by emerging platforms, Pump.fun announced that it would launch an ICO with a valuation of US$4 billion and issue a total of 1 trillion PUMP tokens.
Ironically, this plan, which claims to "give back to early users", conceals the cruel truth: less than 5% of the addresses on the platform have made more than $1,000. The vast majority of participants have become the nourishment of this capital game, while the project side is preparing to start a second round of harvest with new tokens.
When DEXs such as Raydium and Jupiter were suffering from a lack of liquidity, the founder of Pump.fun boasted on the X platform: "We want to make something bigger than Binance." This arrogance completely angered the Solana ecosystem.
A community OG denounced in Discord: "They sucked the blood of the ecosystem dry, but didn't want to leave even a bone." This betrayal laid the groundwork for the dynasty's downfall.
2. The new king is crowned: LetsBONK’s value revolution
On April 26, 2025, Solana’s legendary meme coin BONK unveiled its deadly weapon – the LetsBONK.fun platform.
In just 24 hours after going online, 800,000 users flooded in, creating $300 million in trading volume and creating 2,700 new tokens. Behind this blitzkrieg is a revolution in values deeply rooted in Solana’s genes:
- Ecological Feedback Mechanism: The platform will inject 1% of the transaction feeinto the triple flywheel - part of it will be used for BONKSOL node verification to enhance network security, part of it will be used to repurchase and destroy BONK tokens to achieve deflation, and the remaining funds will support ecological construction. In July 2025, the upgraded commitment will be: 50% of the income will be used to purchase and destroy BONK tokens, directly feeding back to the foundation of the community.
- Creator Economy Revolution: Founder Tom (@SolportTom) personally supports high-quality projects. When GLONK was launched on the platform, he spent $700 to buy tokens and publicly held them, pushing its market value to $18 million. During the same period, the market value of Pump.fun's version of GLONK plummeted to $816,000 due to lack of support. This "founders share risks" model is in cruel contrast to Pump.fun's indifference.
- Developer Gravitational Field: A hackathon with a prize pool of $200,000 will be launched in June 2025, attracting innovative projects such as Delegate.fun. Its $DEL token skyrocketed dozens of times in two days due to the realization of "codeless on-chain operation", proving that ecological incentives can give rise to real technological innovation.
This symbiotic philosophy gave birth to a phenomenal project: Useless Coin. This playful work originated from BONK GUY's tweet "This is a useless currency", and achieved value nirvana in self-mockery. When traditional meme coins rely on animal images, it uses the ironic narrative of "crypto uselessness" to leverage a market value of 264 million US dollars, becoming the sharpest spear piercing the old order.
3. Power Transfer: Paradigm Shift of Community Consensus
The rise of LetsBONK is no accident. It accurately captures the three major paradigm shifts taking place in the crypto world:
The evolution of values from extraction to giving back
Pump.fun represents the Web2-style predatory logic - maximizing the extraction of user value. The token value return mechanism built by LetsBONK is deeply bound to the Solana ecosystem. When Pump.fun converts SOL to USDC, LetsBONK buys back BONK with real money, forming a closed value loop.
This difference is reflected in the data: the price of BONK soared 22% in 24 hours after the platform’s feedback policy was announced, becoming the most resilient meme asset in the Solana ecosystem.
Product philosophy from bubble to flywheel
While Pump.fun is obsessed with creating token bubbles, LetsBONK has built a multi-layered ecosystem: the bottom layer has Meme assets such as HOSICO (Internet celebrity cat IP token, market value of 50 million US dollars) to gather popularity; the middle layer has practical tokens such as NYLA (community-led AI assistant); the top layer is incubating technical solutions such as Delegate.fun. This three-stage rocket of "Meme drainage-practical retention-technical breakthrough" is reconstructing the value chain of the meme launch platform.
The governance revolution from monopoly to co-governance
Pump.fun's closed rule gave rise to a resistance alliance. Raydium's LaunchLab, Believe and other platforms used differentiated strategies to share the market, causing Pump.fun's share to plummet by more than 40 percentage points. Raydium adopted the "pack of wolves" strategy, integrating sub-platforms such as cook.meme to fight on multiple fronts. This decentralized competition is the true return of the Solana spirit.
This change has been endorsed by the capital vane. Mike Dudas, partner of 6th Man Ventures, asserted in a podcast: "Pure Meme Coins are dead, and value capture is the future". While projects such as Hyperliquid have verified the feasibility of this model by buying back tokens through handling fees, Pump.fun is still trying to harvest the market with the narrative of "worthless tokens", and its ICO plan is even more absurd in the context of stricter supervision.
4. Bloody Revelation: The Ultimate Game of Crypto Capitalism
LetsBONK's road to the throne is still full of thorns. Its platform token $LETSBONK has experienced a sharp drop from a market value of 30 million US dollars to 4 million US dollars, proving that enthusiasm alone cannot sustain the ecosystem. And Pump.fun has a cash reserve of 600 million US dollars and may launch a subsidy war at any time. The essence of this war is the ultimate game between two crypto-capitalist routes:
- Financialization dead end: Pump.fun's ICO plan exposes its ultimate ambition - to completely financialize the platform. According to the leaked plan, its $4 billion valuation is equivalent to a 6-fold price-to-earnings ratio of its 2024 revenue, and the design of token generation and full circulation is bound to trigger a tsunami of selling. This path of "draining the ecosystem-financial packaging-high-level cashing out" is exactly the destruction game that traditional capital is best at.
- Ecological survival path: LetsBONK's hackathon has emerged with real use cases such as Delegate.fun, where users can achieve complex operations such as airdrops and destruction through "delegated wallet + task flow triggering". When large-scale applications of Web3 require code-free solutions, this technical value precipitated from the Meme carnival may become Solana's key weapon against Ethereum. Not to mention its policy of50% revenue repurchase of BONK, which is building a perpetual motion machine for the token economy.
The pendulum of history has already swung. When VC giants declared in a podcast that "the era of worthless tokens is coming to an end", when Solana founder Toly personally stood up for BONK, and when LetsBONK's trading volume exceeded 86 million US dollars in a single day, we clearly heard the roar of the collapse of the old order. This is not a simple platform replacement, but a rebirth of the crypto spirit - from extraction to symbiosis, from monopoly to co-governance, from financial games to ecological co-construction.
The crypto world is never a mathematical experiment in a vacuum, but a battleground between humanity and capital. Pump.fun used 18 months to prove how efficient a wealth machine can be built with pure profit drive. And LetsBONK used 70 days to show that when faith is injected into the code and finance returns to the community, the forgotten original intention of blockchain is still burning.
At this moment on the Solana chain, the new king holds a bloody scepter, with the cold corpses of the old dynasty at his feet. In the bloody setting sun, a line of code flashes like an oath: If you want to exploit, you will be overthrown.
