Since Pumpfun became a phenomenal product, the impression of Launchpad by players entering the market has changed from ICO/IDO platforms such as Coinlist to various "meme-like" launchers, from the various ".fun" imitations in the beginning to the Launchpad wars of the public chain, and then to the birth of the SocialFi/AI +Launchpad paradigm. Now, the ICM "Internet Capital Markets" concept promoted by Solana is popular, and the fate of Silicon Valley technology companies and VCs has increased the competition in this "battle".
Even though the Memecoin market has not grown in terms of numbers, new Launchpad projects continue to emerge. This is because with the change in the "asset issuance" model, Launchpad no longer carries only "Meme culture" and is not limited to a broader market beyond "ICO era" blockchain projects.
From "value investing" to "price investing"
For blockchain projects, in addition to traditional financing models and structures such as IDO and ICO, the most popular financing model at present should be Launchpad, and more and more project parties are beginning to get used to this model. Compared with the traditional model, it is "lighter" and more suitable for blockchain projects. Judging from the monthly IDO/ICO public sale data of CryptoRank, the proportion of this fundraising model in the market has gradually decreased.
But taking the data of PumpFun as an example, a total of 100,000 tokens have been "graduated" since 2024. Based on the graduation threshold of raising about 80 SOL (the average price of SOL from March last year to May this year was $177.87), at least about 140 million US dollars have been raised in the "internal market" of PumpFun alone, accounting for 6.3% of the total financing amount of 22.5 billion US dollars from last year to date, including private seed rounds.
Although the comparison with public data cannot fully cover the total amount, and the domestic fundraising and investment amounts cannot be compared, the "ICM" trend has gradually emerged, and more and more malicious funds are willing to look for investment opportunities in Launchpad.
What’s the new Launchpad doing?
VC endorsement + anti-RUG mechanism —— Cooking.City
Cooking City is a launchpad with $7 million of investment from Jump Crypto , CMT Digital , Bitscale Capital , Mirana Ventures , andEVG. Cooking.City is committed to reshaping the token issuance mechanism and proposing a new on-chain issuance model that is sustainable, incentive-based, and community-centric.
The new model proposed by Cooking.City includes value redistribution, which redistributes most of the platform fees to developers and users, a confidence pool mechanism, in which token issuers are required to deposit a certain amount of funds in the smart contract in advance, and a social-based value distribution system, which introduces a referral rebate system and redistributes fees within the ecosystem. Most of the fees are used for community recommendations and transaction rewards, part of them are returned to the token issuer, and the rest are invested in the long-term development of the platform.
During the beta testing phase, Cooking City will receive an invitation code and a "profit and loss card" with a wallet address after linking the wallet, as well as the "Yap" task of the new version of Galxe, which makes users feel like they are in the "Old School" cold start mode of the previous cycle project.
Amid the chaos of the cryptocurrency market where tokens frequently return to zero upon opening, the protocol attempts to rebuild the foundation of trust between project owners and investors through the dual-wheel drive of "fund pledge + market verification".
Specifically, when developers create tokens, they need to inject at least 10 SOL as "belief funds" and set a bottom line for the token price. This fund will be locked immediately until the project passes the market test.
If the token reaches the "graduation standard" set by the platform within 5 days, such as transaction volume and activeness of the coin holding address, all pledged SOL will be injected into the dynamic liquidity pool (DLMM) at the preset price, and a rigid protection network will be built on the decentralized exchange. If the token does not reach the "graduation standard" within 5 days, the pledged funds will be fully refunded to the developer, but the token will permanently lose the price protection qualification.
At the same time, to ensure the effective operation of the mechanism, the protocol adds multiple insurances. If the liquidity pool funds are exhausted within 5 days, the protection net will be automatically lifted; if there is any surplus, it will be returned to the developer. The tokens obtained by the developer are forced to be locked for 30 days, and the Streamflow protocol is used to prevent the market from being dumped and cashed out. The advantage of this mechanism is that it allows developers to "set flags" with funds, which motivates them to seriously promote the development of the project. At the same time, it provides traders with a certain degree of price floor protection to reduce the risk of being "broken through the floor", and uses "whether to graduate" and "whether to activate protection" to judge whether a token is reliable and reduce the risk of stepping on thunder.
However, there are many platforms that used the same mechanism to protect prices. The reasons for their demise are nothing more than two: one is that they cannot continue to create attention tokens, and the other is that they have not found a suitable sinking market. This type of mechanism is not as attractive to "serious" project parties as Virtual, Believe and other ecosystems, and the threshold is too high for "manipulators" and popular concepts. How to maintain the continuity of the market after the forced lock-up is over may be the key to the project.
Long 's belief-based issuance mechanism
The Long platform introduces a new primitive called "dynamic auction" to strongly align incentives between project parties, early supporters and long-term holders. Different from the traditional snap-up mechanism, Long uses a higher starting price and an automatic auction system to avoid early buyers hoarding at low prices, shape a healthier market foundation, and screen out users with real conviction.
Specifically, in stark contrast to the traditional platforms’ pursuit of “buying at a low price”, Long requires tokens to be launched at an astonishing premium—the initial price can be up to 30-4000 times that of conventional platforms. This design is like a “licensed financing channel” that naturally filters out short-term speculators and only attracts participants with high cognition and high conviction.
At the same time, the slow-paced Dutch auction, which is conducted in hours, ensures that every participant has enough time to evaluate the value of the project. The Dutch auction mechanism is an auction model in which prices decrease from high to low, which is the opposite of the traditional "highest bidder wins" English auction. Its core logic is to stimulate demand with price cuts until the market's real acceptance price is found. On the Long platform, each round of token sales starts at a high price, and the price then gradually decreases through an automatic Dutch auction mechanism until market demand and price reach a balance. Therefore, the first real transaction price may fall anywhere between the high starting price and the preset minimum price.
In addition, in order to deal with the rampant robot sniping problem in the industry, the Long platform has deployed a sophisticated triple defense system. Including, the upside-down penalty mechanism, that is, the earlier you buy, the higher the price, compressing arbitrage profits; time period price lock, that is, each trading window only refreshes the quotation in the first transaction of each time period, and rebalances the price through liquidity reconstruction after each update, so that the cost of MEV attack surges 10 times; value protection wall, that is, each sale sets the global minimum reserve price, superimposed with a certain protective liquidity buffer, to ensure that participants can always exit at a level not lower than the average issuance price; if the sales do not meet expectations, the system will automatically refund.
At the same time, the platform breaks up the monopoly of whale by designing mechanisms such as "dividing the token supply into multiple rounds of auctions, with the quantity in each round strictly limited" and "large purchase orders automatically triggering current price increases"; and by forcing project parties to set up transparent on-chain unlocking plans and not allowing reserved tokens to exceed 10%, it binds the long-term interests of project parties.
In short, Long is a brand-new platform based on "belief issuance", which uses auctions instead of snapping up, transparency instead of gambling, and mechanisms to align long-term interests. Here, those who truly identify with the project will enter in a fair way and enjoy a more stable market starting point and longer-term return space.
A new paradigm for social identity assetization - Ego
Ego is a social asset issuance platform in the Solana ecosystem. The platform adheres to the principle of "one address, one person, one token". Each Ego Token represents a unique personal profile and can only be bound to one social account (such as Twitter). The initial distribution is completed through an open and fair pre-sale mechanism to eliminate preemption, monopoly and pre-embedding.
Each Ego Token pre-sale lasts for 4 hours, and users can participate in the purchase of token shares corresponding to the Profile by depositing SOL. The pre-sale is open for 25% of the total supply of the token, and all participants purchase at the same price, without any first-mover advantage or slippage exploitation. The pre-sale has a minimum subscription threshold of 60 SOL. If this amount is not reached, the pre-sale will automatically fail and all funds will be returned.
After the pre-sale is successful, the system will use the raised SOL and 25% of the token supply to inject into the Raydium liquidity pool to form the first trading market. 25% of the total token allocation is allocated to pre-sale participants, 25% is used for Raydium initial liquidity, and 50% is reserved for the corresponding social account owners and future incentive distribution.
Anyone can initiate a pre-sale of Ego tokens for an X account. After the pre-sale is successful, the owner of the account can officially claim the token by binding the account or logging in to verify the identity. After successful verification, the profile owner will receive 50% of the total tokens as a reserved share, but it needs to be gradually unlocked by completing subsequent tasks and achievements to encourage their continued participation in the platform ecosystem. In addition, after the token is launched, the profile owner will also receive 50% of the transaction fee share to bind its long-term value.
At the same time, in order to prevent project parties or account owners from "scamming", file owners must go through a public 7-day announcement period before receiving the earned tokens. This is transparent and traceable to ensure that the community is informed in advance. If the community finds unreasonable behavior during this period, it can intervene in time to avoid sudden selling pressure.
This concept has appeared several times before. This type of transmitter that uses personal influence on social media to "issue coins" generally prohibits others from opening pre-sales for a certain account X, but this platform allows everyone to initiate "token pre-sales" and the account holder owns 50% of the shares. This mechanism actually makes the chip holding structure very unbalanced, and it is difficult for participants to get protection.
Mev+Launchpad—— Gavel’s unique “taxation” launch mode
Gavel is an on-chain token issuance and liquidity guidance platform that hopes to move the entire token issuance process to the chain to avoid the high fees of centralized exchanges. At the same time, it realizes on-chain price discovery and prevents users from encountering harmful MEV attacks.
Currently, many project parties face a dilemma when issuing tokens: on the one hand, choosing a centralized exchange to list a token often means paying up to 10% of the total token supply for listing and liquidity fees, and the process is not transparent. On the other hand, although on-chain issuance is low-cost, it is easy to be attacked by front-runners and MEV robots, resulting in value loss.
Gavel provides a fair, transparent and efficient on-chain fundraising and token distribution mechanism, combined with secure and controllable liquidity management, to achieve full auditability and transparency of the token life cycle. Currently, many tokens on Solana are issued using the Bonding Curve, which means that the starting price is extremely low, and as the purchase volume increases, the price rises. The starting price is usually set artificially and does not represent the true market value of the token.
This leads to a robot race - whoever can buy faster can get the token at a very low price and then sell it to ordinary users at a high price. By analogy, this is like Taylor Swift's concert tickets were sold for $200 at the beginning, but were sold out by scalpers and then resold for $1000. The negative impacts of sniping include the actual funds raised by the project party (arbitrage by robots) and the price of tokens obtained by ordinary users is worse.
Most AMMs are not vulnerable to MEV attacks, but Gavel uses an anti-pinch AMM mechanism that retains the bilateral liquidity of traditional AMMs while preventing pinch trading. Gavel's core mechanism includes initial public offerings, raising funds through multiple models and providing initial token liquidity, ensuring that the fundraising price is consistent with the AMM launch opening price to prevent arbitrage.
After the fundraising is completed, the remaining tokens and part of the SOL raised will be injected into the anti-sandwich AMM to achieve transparent and unified prices and prevent front-running and cross-sanding attacks. In addition, Gavel adopts a temporary liquidity design. As trading activity increases, the AMM gradually withdraws, automatically withdraws liquidity positions and destroys tokens to avoid permanent asset losses caused by traditional lock-ups.
Currently, the only token launched by the platform is IBRL, which is Gavel's demonstration token that purely demonstrates the operation process of the protocol. The total supply of tokens is currently 1 billion, of which 700 million are distributed through a 24-hour public fundraising. Participants deposit SOL within a fixed period of time and eventually receive a token quota based on the proportion of the total amount they contribute - for example, if they contribute 1% of the total amount, they can get 70 million IBRL × 1% = 7 million IBRL.
This method is fair and has no front-running, and there is no investment cap. The disadvantage is that users cannot know the final price when they deposit, but the AMM will be activated according to the fundraising price to facilitate subsequent exit. After the fundraising is completed, the remaining 300 million IBRL and 3/7 of the SOL raised will be injected into Gavel's AMM. For example, if the total fundraising amount is 700 SOL, 300 million shares of 300 million IBRL and 300 SOL will be injected into the AMM, and the remaining 400 SOL will be reserved for subsequent destruction.
The liquidity part will be gradually withdrawn after 7 days, with 0.01% (1bp) withdrawn every 2,000 blocks (Slot). After the withdrawal, SOL will be exchanged for IBRL and destroyed. At the same time, the remaining SOL inventory will also use 0.01% of funds to purchase and destroy IBRL every 1,000 blocks. The whole process is completely executed automatically on the chain, without any permission, and driven by Crank.
Gavel is a full-process on-chain platform built for the Solana project, providing fair fundraising, controllable liquidity and transparent price discovery, eliminating the risks of front-running and pinch trading, avoiding the high fees of centralized exchanges, and realizing automated management of token issuance and liquidity. Currently, it has received support from many groups of Solana, but for most project parties, providing liquidity market makers requires higher "technical costs" and "capital costs."
In an increasingly crowded track, who will solve the liquidity problem?
From the data point of view, although the current DEX transaction volume is 4 times that of the same period last year and 10 times that of the same period last year, the total amount of TVL has not increased proportionally, only increasing by 20% compared with the same period last year and 250% compared with the same period last year. The reason may be the change in the market's "mainstream trading" tendency. The life cycle of tokens is getting shorter and shorter, and there are more and more "P youngsters", which also leads to "falsely high" trading volume on the surface. In addition, the slowdown in the incremental transactions on the chain may also be related to the gradual "mainstream and compliant" transactions in the market, and there are no more "killer applications/narratives" on the chain to prevent the external increment from increasing. But no matter what the reason is, the current market is facing the lack of incremental market.
In the absence of an incremental market, more and more Launchpads are emerging, and the only ones currently active on the Solana chain are Believe, which is also invested by AllianceDAO, BONK, which is supported by the early Solana OG community, and Virtuals, which is "far away" on the Base chain. Most Launchpads can only last for a month.
In addition to the meme craze it brought to Solana and the entire Crypto market, and the market's "OG" plot, the core of the product itself is the same as the concept of "Less is more" by the pioneering modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. As a Launchpad, the only function it needs is to issue tokens. The anchoring effect plus path dependence, and finally the dopamine-driven feedback loop formed by continuous "DEGEN" have made Pumpfun flourish in the launcher.
From the data, the ratio of Pumpfun's "graduation tokens" to the internal market has dropped from more than 20% at the beginning. After US President Trump released his own Memecoin, it has dropped rapidly. More and more junk Memecoins cannot graduate, and the graduation rate has also dropped sharply to a minimum of 0.57% in March. This means that only 5 and a half of every 1,000 Pumpfun tokens can graduate. In 2024, the undergraduate admission rate of Harvard University, one of the world's top universities, is about 5%. In a sense, the competition to "graduate" from the internal market is greater than the competition to get into Harvard.
The competition to make money on PumpFun is also fierce. This month, only 1.76% of the addresses in the market have made more than $1,000 on PumpFun. As the market becomes "aesthetically fatigued" by more and more junk Memecoins, fewer and fewer people are able to make money.
In addition, the project team has continued to sell SOL for handling fees and earned $700 million. Recently, there has even been news that Pumpfun will raise $1 billion at a valuation of $4 billion. Both the Solana ecosystem and retail investors in the market have been complaining that it will "drain the liquidity of the market."
Well-known KOL 0xTodd tweeted on X that he "doesn't like pump fun" and joked about Pumpfun's upcoming financing: "In the past year, Pump has emptied the pockets of Degen on the chain, Binance, Coinbase, and Solana Foundation. Looking around, the only thing missing is the first-tier institutions and traditional institutions."
There are also many different opinions in the market. Another well-known KOL Crypto Wei-Chou believes that SOLANA Maxi's criticism of PumpFun is an act of forgetting its roots. He also counted the specific logic of how PumpFun "saved" Solana, and added, "If you are really SOLANA Maxi, you'd better hope that Pump succeeds. Because from the perspective of value investment, its PE RATIO is only about 5, which is a true price bid. From an ecological perspective, Pump is actually the largest Consumer App on the entire network. If the market value of such a thing cannot enter the top 50, you'd better clear it out and short SOL."
Regardless of whether PumpFun's financing is successful or not, the "coin issuance wave" it has brought about has given the market a new understanding of the form of asset issuance, which is also the ideological change brought about by the "creative entrepreneurship trend" brought about by AI Vibe Coding, Meme culture, Degen culture and other cultures.
When ideas become assets and when attention becomes liquidity, the rules for the flow of money quietly change.
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