MEME Launch Platform Chaos: Over a Dozen Platforms Emerge, Sun Pump Enters, VC Observes

Author: Arain, ChainCatcher

Editor: Marco, ChainCatcher

According to data from Dune Analytics, Pump.Fun has generated approximately $99.74 million in revenue since March 1 of this year. A super mini team of only three people has created nearly $100 million in revenue in about half a year.

Retail investors are cheering for the wealth effect on Pump.Fun, while competitors are ambitiously joining the Meme Launchpad feast. With TRON founder Justin Sun announcing that TRON will support the first fair launch trading meme coin platform "SunPump" within its ecosystem, the MemeCoin frenzy seems to have entered its second half.

In the face of emerging competitors to Pump.Fun, more investment institutions and investors are taking a wait-and-see approach.

"We're not investing because this cycle is too short. If the platform itself is making money, it generally won't issue platform tokens; once issued, it's not far from its death period," a nameless investment institution stated bluntly in an interview with ChainCatcher.

Justin Sun also pointed out the market reality in an interview with ChainCatcher, stating that nothing can create an exciting narrative in such a short time like memes. TRON hopes to inject new vitality into a market that is as calm as dead water.

Of course, "new launchers will siphon off existing funds," Justin Sun said.

Meme Launchpad Concentration Emerges, Investors Mostly Wait-and-See

Describing this year's cryptocurrency market as a "Summer of Memes" is not an exaggeration. On Dune Analytics' "Crypto Narratives" section, memes are the loudest narrative concept.

Pump.Fun, true to its name, is a massive pump on Solana: while continuously creating phenomenal meme projects that explode overnight, it also brings joy to participants in a market that currently lacks volatility.

"You can't imagine how big this market is. The wealth effect of memes is strong, and the entry barrier is low, offering individual users the narrative temptation of a turnaround. Sufficient penetration will attract a larger user base. Pump.Fun is like Uniswap back in the day; the stories of Uniswap and SushiSwap will surely repeat. The Meme Launchpad sector won't always have Pump.Fun as the sole leader," said a leader of a meme community, which is still in preparation, ready to target meme coins alongside some upcoming new Meme Launchpads.

During the previous DeFi summer, Uniswap stood out, allowing users to issue and list tokens with just a few dozen dollars, especially with the one-click liquidity provision feature that enabled it to bypass centralized exchanges, making it visible and tradable to users. This led to Uniswap becoming a paradise for altcoins and "dog coins." This is quite similar to today's Pump.Fun. Later, SushiSwap emerged and once shared the spotlight with Uniswap.

Even Pump.Fun's anonymous founder Alon mentioned in a live stream that Pump.Fun is mimicking Uniswap V2's joint curve trading to provide participants with a similar trading experience.

However, Alon did not invent the joint curve; he focuses on creating a fair publishing platform for content creators and speculators. He believes that mimicking the best LP (liquidity provider) issuance, Pump.Fun's joint curve requires about 3 to 5K in liquidity balance.

In fact, it is precisely the pursuit of "fairness" that has allowed Pump.Fun to maintain its leading position.

Makenow.meme, as a competitor to Pump.Fun, was once popular in the Meme Launchpad market. This product simplified the process for users to issue meme coins to just a tweet, but its rules clearly favored KOLs, Degen players, scientists, etc., and were not "fair." Additionally, it violated X's rules, leading to its official account being frozen for a period, and Makenow.meme ultimately faded into obscurity.

Despite many competitors to Pump.Fun ultimately failing, the market is still waiting for projects that can rival Pump.Fun. More accurately, it should be said that they are looking to carve out a piece of Pump.Fun's cake.

According to data from RootData and organized by ChainCatcher, an incomplete count shows that since 2024, more than 10 new Meme Launchpad or Meme Launchpad-featured projects have emerged, supporting different public chains, with the most being Meme Launchpad projects on Base and Solana.

This may be due to the relatively low operating costs on these two public chains; however, Pump.Fun's anonymous founder Alon believes that the culture and ecology of public chains also play a role.

In a live stream, he specifically mentioned Solana and Base, stating that Solana has a unique and authentic culture closely intertwined with anonymous memes, while Base, unlike Solana, has more cryptocurrencies and focuses on community building.

Although the market holds expectations for new Meme Launchpads to "outperform the latecomers," and ChainCatcher has learned that several similar projects have recently started and are seeking financing, most investment institutions remain cautious.

Justin Sun told ChainCatcher: "The remaining altcoin capital is still in an escape state. The popular narratives in the market have already been hyped up, and many project parties have failed to achieve subsequent milestones, with poor token economic models leading to losses. At this low point in the market, TRON's choice to reignite the meme fire is intended to inject new vitality into the stagnant market through TRON's efforts and drive."

"Currently, there are many memecoin launch platforms on various public chains, and most institutions are taking a wait-and-see approach. Since asset issuance and trading have mature business models, we do not expect institutional investment but aim to generate positive cash flow through self-sustaining efforts to achieve a healthy business model," said Jill, the head of MemeFun.

Jill introduced that MemeFun is currently the first memecoin launch platform in the ICP (Dfinity) ecosystem. The team previously worked on an inscription trading market and has a leading inscription platform in multiple public chain ecosystems, having received investment from Binance-related capital, and transitioned to a meme launch platform in mid-year.

"The inscriptions ultimately did not form a widespread consensus. Compared to inscriptions, meme assets have a longer lifecycle, experiencing several rounds of bull and bear markets while still frequently revitalizing, forming a globally recognized consensus. Moreover, the cultural attributes of memes imply widespread dissemination and lasting vitality. Therefore, we chose the memecoin launcher track with the market buying pressure switching in this cycle," Jill explained their perspective on the meme track, which is also the reason for their transition into this field.

Capital Testing the Waters

As mentioned by the interviewee, most capital is in a wait-and-see state, but there are also projects that have secured funding.

According to RootData, four projects—Memehub.AI, Trugly.meme, We.Rich, and STIX—have currently received funding support.

ChainCatcher found that the biggest common feature of these four funded projects is that they do not only focus on Meme Launchpad; some are upgraded versions of Meme Launchpad, while others are Meme Launchpad +.

For example, Memehub.AI belongs to the Meme Launchpad + AI category. As a winning project in the Binance Hackathon, Memehub.AI received support from the Binance incubator. It is an AI-driven meme coin launch platform that allows users to generate meme coin-related concepts, including names, logos, introductions, and posters, with just a sentence or keyword, and create multi-mechanism meme coins at a very low cost without needing to provide liquidity for trading. The project will support deployment on multiple public chains.

We.Rich and Trugly.meme both carry social tags, but at this stage, their products can also be seen as upgraded versions of Meme Launchpad.

We.Rich secured $2 million in seed funding led by Folius Ventures and Animoca Brands on July 31.

The platform positions itself as a UGA, or user-generated asset platform, rather than a Meme Launchpad. Its slogan is "Anyone can be a founder," allowing anyone to issue meme coins without needing LP. After issuance, the created meme coins enter the fundraising progress of the "seed round," and once the fundraising is completed, the platform incentivizes creators with a reward of 0.1 ETH. If they choose to buy a portion of the meme coin while issuing it, the creators can also take a share of the transaction fees of the corresponding meme coin. The platform is deployed on Base and currently uses Coinbase's wallet, enabling zero-cost one-click issuance of meme coins.

Trugly.meme shares some similarities with We.Rich's rules. The platform received investment from Gm Capital on April 25, which has also invested in Movement. It is a platform for issuing, trading, and discovering meme coins on Base. Users can issue MEME404 and standard meme coins for free in less than six seconds. Although meme issuance is free, there are fundraising targets; only upon completion of the fundraising target will it go live, or else it will be refunded. After fundraising is completed, the meme will officially go live, and creators can allocate up to 50%, but there is a one-month lock-up period and a one-year vesting requirement. Additionally, Trugly.meme supports MEME404, a protocol that allows meme coin holders to display their balances through unique NFTs, unlocking different levels or "tiers," thus creating a class system among meme holders.

As for STIX, it is different from the previous three projects, being a derivative project of Stickerly, one of the world's largest Web2 user-generated content sticker publishing platforms. Web3 STIX utilizes Stickerly's distribution platform to issue token incentives through regular meme popularity contests and promotes heavily on STIX and Stickerly, making it essentially a traffic-generating project.

The project completed a $1.8 million private placement round on July 26, with participation from dozens of crypto KOLs, including Presto Labs, Selini Capital, Mythos Group, and Altcoin Sherpa. This funding will prepare for STIX's beta release and token issuance.

New Disruptors and PumpFun Seeking Change

Meme Launchpads that have completed financing are VC Meme Launchpads, but those that have not secured funding do not mean they are not worth noting—PumpFun, the current leader in the Meme Launchpad space, has not received financing either.

However, on July 18, the DeFi protocol Burve Protocol officially announced on X that it would acquire PumpFun at a valuation of $50 million.

Perhaps due to the progress of the acquisition or stimulated by market competitors, pump.fun announced two significant changes (in beta) on August 9:

1. Free token issuance. Token creators no longer need to pay about $2 to create tokens; instead, the first buyer of the token will pay. (Note: This unlocks the use case for someone to create a token without purchasing any tokens).

2. If the token completes its bonding curve process, the creator will receive 0.5 SOL ($80). This fee is paid from pump.fun's migration fee (now only 1.5 SOL); it will be paid regardless of whether the token developer has ever held or still holds the token; the reward also incentivizes all developers to increase their token allocation to 100%.

Shortly after this reform was announced, SunPump launched its beta version on August 13, breaking Pump.Fun's monopoly.

From ChainCatcher's recent interview with Justin Sun (the original interview can be found by searching on ChainCatcher's official website), Sun Pump claims principles of fair issuance and fair trading, allowing creators to issue tokens easily and at a very low cost, using a joint curve pricing mechanism similar to PumpFun.

However, unlike Pump.Fun, as the first supported Meme Launchpad in the TRON ecosystem, SunPump enjoys traffic support from TRON, gas subsidies, and a multi-million dollar incentive program.

According to Dune data and information disclosed by Justin Sun on social media, within about a week of the Sun Pump Beta version going live, there have already been days where its revenue exceeded that of Pump.Fun, and its traffic has reached 30%-40% of Pump.Fun's.

"In the first week after launch, the number of projects created exceeded ten thousand, with revenue reaching 4.36 million TRX, demonstrating that the platform achieved good economic benefits in a short time. Through a decentralized approach, we use protocol revenue to buy back and burn SUN tokens, providing long-term value feedback to protocol participants. This mechanism not only enhances users' confidence in the platform but also contributes to the platform's sustainable development," Justin Sun told ChainCatcher.

There is a viewpoint that the rise of SunPump comes at the cost of traffic loss from Pump.Fun, somewhat akin to the vampire attack that SushiSwap launched against Uniswap back in the day.

In Justin Sun's view, it is not easy for new Meme Launchpads to carve out a foothold.

"Given the current relatively sluggish investment sentiment, new launchers will siphon off existing funds. If latecomers lack sustained economic incentives and innovative gameplay, it will be very difficult to survive. To bring in incremental growth, the platform needs to have sufficiently low launch costs, deep liquidity, and even trading flexibility. Looking at the entire industry ecosystem, there are not many teams that can meet all three criteria to be launchers."

It is worth noting that Sun Pump is based on the TRON ecosystem, while Pump.Fun is based on the Solana ecosystem. Alon pointed out in a live stream that different public chain ecosystems have different cultures, and culture is crucial for projects aimed at serving a large user base. Memes themselves are a unique cultural phenomenon that can serve as shorthand for ideas or communities, "just like the example of Dogecoin and Elon Musk."

Additionally, Alon mentioned his concerns about Blast, as this chain is rapidly developing but lacks substantial content and is overly focused on economic benefits, making it harder for good projects to gain attention on that chain.

"A blockchain with unique projects and strong culture will succeed in the long run," Alon shared his perspective.

Jill also believes that cultural attributes are necessary and introduced the cultural ecosystem of ICP, stating, "The Chinese are relatively unfamiliar with the ICP ecosystem, but in Europe and America, it is quite an interesting ecosystem. The meme characteristics on ICP are a kind of geeky fun. For example, many memes worth hundreds of millions of dollars on Solana only start with one image and end with that same image. Some memes on ICP, like EXE, combine the Windows 98 interface with memes to create a retro product, entering different applications through last century's desktop. For instance, Motoko uses the programming language on ICP as a meme symbol while also building a developer community. This geeky style of meme is a step closer than just a pure financial game." This is the reason MemeFun chose the ICP ecosystem.

As for TRON, Justin Sun initially positioned it as a global digital content entertainment system, but for a long time, TRON's ecosystem has been dominated by stablecoins, thus forming its initial positioning as a payment blockchain. Following the trend of launching Sun Pump and shaking up PumpFun, the ecosystem landscape on TRON is changing.

"Culture is everything." This is Alon's summary from the live stream.

Alon also shared a trend he has recently observed, which is that the development of memes is moving towards NFTs. However, memes differ from NFTs in that NFTs require deeper cultural resonance and are a more complex product. He is excited about this trend.