In the early morning of April 26, Solana's veteran Meme coin BONK announced the launch of its own LaunchPad - LetsBonk.fun, with the market responding enthusiastically, shouting "LetsBONK!" Within just 24 hours, it created 800,000 visitors, $300 million in trading volume, and 2,700 tokens were created, with over 70 successfully launched. The eponymous token Let's BONK even skyrocketed to a $30 million market cap in just 6 hours.
With so many projects launching LaunchPads, why does BONK have such tremendous energy? After the initial excitement, will BONK be a flash in the pan or truly rise?
BONK's Position in the Solana Ecosystem
When mentioning BONK, many people's first impression is the "yellow Shiba Inu logo" and the second impression is the "Saga phone airdrop". Tracing back, this yellow Shiba Inu was the primary catalyst for Solana phone sales. When Solana launched the phone, they wanted to create an ecosystem, with the first step being the phone but the key focus was creating a crypto-first app store, allowing crypto participants to be free from Apple and Google's ecosystem.
Initially, phone sales were only 20-30 units daily, and even after promotion, sales only reached 50-60 units, potentially taking years to sell 20,000 phones. During Toly's podcast with Laura Shin, he candidly admitted selling only 2,500 Saga phones, but just three days later, they sold 15,000 in a single day. By then, the BONK airdrop was already multiple times the phone's price, creating a new model that connected physical products with the ecosystem through a Memecoin.
Toly stated in a Bankless interview, "I believe Solana developers and NFT developers are two groups with some intersection, but clearly different types of developers, and BONK connected them, turning the phone into an NFT, and BONK holders had to pay attention to the phone application ecosystem."
Two years have passed, and BONK has continuously built the Solana ecosystem for two years, actively participating in DeFi, GameFi, developer communities, and applications. It has established over 10 applications and integrated $BONK into more than 100 ecosystem systems. When the Solana ecosystem needed to launch a LaunchPad war, it came with LetsBonk.fun.
Meteora once did something similar to what Raydium is doing now, which was to propose an SDK strategy, attempting to slowly erode PumpFun's market share through a human wave tactic, but it was unsuccessful and not significant. Raydium apparently understands the heart of on-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 portion of its transaction fee income.
Two months later, they were well-prepared. First, they sent out cook.meme to probe the market. After "cooking" two memecoins with market values of tens of millions of dollars, "Time" and "Symmetra" lost subsequent market momentum and settled for a while. They then reignited the market through LetsBONK. Coincidentally, the first avatar on cook.meme's promotional image was BONK.
Now, Raydium's LaunchLab has integrated 6 platforms and launched trading reward tasks, encouraging users to trade directly on Raydium. LaunchLab has also shown initial effectiveness in trading volume, but its future development needs continued tracking and observation.
The LaunchPad and DEX markets have now formed a multi-party confrontation, with everyone wanting to grab this tempting cake. Raydium seems to have planned to counter PumpFun's "single brand" monopoly model through a "multi-brand" wheel strategy. The outcome remains unknown, but we hope more retail investors can benefit and bring liquidity back to the market. However, in the current market situation where "cash is king", we hope all readers manage their funds well while seeking opportunities.
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