An Update On The Launchpad Wars: There's A Disturbance In The Force

Written by Jason Krutzky, Chartered Meme Technician at Spot Trading.

Hello Traders,

In the meme game, feel matters as much as fundamentals. Memes live and die by memetic value, which is impossible to quantify but essential to recognize.

Time in the game is everything—it's how you develop the instinct to spot which memes have staying power.

Right now, my instincts are telling me something's off. The community is fracturing, at least to some degree:

• Pump bros are down bad and pointing accusations at the Bonk team

• Bonk ecosystem projects are angry about revenue distribution

• Jupiter is starting to get more vocal after a month of quietly building community

Basically, this generally fun and carefree space is turning a bit negative, and it has me concerned.

To understand where we might be headed, let's first break down what we know is happening right now.

🚀 An Update On The Launchpad Wars

Just a month ago, the launchpad landscape looked completely different. Today? We're witnessing one of the fastest market reversals I've seen in crypto.

• LetsBonk: ~86% 

• PumpFun: ~8%

• Jup Studio: ~3.4% (but captured 10.2% this weekend on the heels of $URANUS' success)

This is a complete reversal from just a month ago.

So, how did LetsBonk go from challenger to champion so quickly? Simple: they're throwing money at everything that moves. Buyback and burn. Buyback and burn. Repeat until you're the biggest player in the room.

The Jupiter team is taking a different approach, offering more professional tooling and infrastructure to their creators, but they're also giving creators revenue in the form of swap fees and liquidity pools. 

And PumpFun? They're fumbling the bag. There's talk of incentive programs and $PUMP token rewards based on trading volume, but it's all vapor right now. For a platform that pioneered this space, watching them get outmaneuvered is almost painful.

🍂  Reading The Tea Leaves: What Comes Next?

This is where we put on our tinfoil hats and try to get ahead of the news that could send our bags to the moon or straight to zero.

Bonk's Wall Street Dreams

The Bonk team isn't just thinking about degens anymore—they're eyeing institutional money. Word is they're working on bringing an ETF to market, which would make them the first memecoin with legitimate tradfi investment vehicles.

Imagine being able to buy exposure to $USELESS and $GP through a regulated financial product. It sounds insane, but so did Bitcoin ETFs a few years ago.

If they pull this off, we're not just talking about price pumps—we're talking about infrastructure that could enable cross-chain expansion and compliance tools that would make memecoins accessible to institutional capital for the first time ever.

Jupiter's Infrastructure Play

The most intriguing possibility here is whether Jupiter will open their DeFi infrastructure to successful token creators. With access to Jupiter Lend protocols, the $1.6 billion JLP liquidity pool, and professional trading tools, token creators could build comprehensive financial ecosystems around their projects.

While not officially announced, Jupiter has all the necessary components for this revolutionary approach.

Imagine the types of creators and builders that would want to take advantage of this kind of advanced functionality. It's not your 50-coin-a-day dev just spraying and praying for one of their coins to bond, I'll tell you that. 

PumpFun's Survival Strategy

If facing an existential threat, Pump.fun might need to pivot toward quality curation, seek platform partnerships with other DeFi protocols, or implement creator revenue sharing that matches or exceeds that of their competitors.

Let's not forget, they were first to market. They were true innovators who saw a huge hole in the market and filled it. They might see something coming in the future that no one else sees. That's what innovators do, after all.

🥩 The Real Stakes

The Launchpad Wars are heating up, and the rhetoric is getting more aggressive because everyone understands what's really at stake here.

The winning platform doesn't just capture token launch fees—they potentially control the gateway to the next generation of crypto projects. 

But in all this fighting for market share and revenue, it feels like we're losing sight of what made this space special in the first place.

The memes.

Memes are supposed to be fun. Memes are a way to build community. Memes are a way to proliferate a message. Memes are a way to create a new reality.

The platforms that remember this—that figure out how to scale while preserving the magic—those are the ones that will still be here when the dust settles.

Our job as traders and community members is to find the memes that manage to do all of this while sidestepping the drama between their respective launchpads. The memes that stay true to what this is all about, even as the infrastructure around them gets more sophisticated.

Who do you think is going to win? Are there teams building that are going to destroy Bonk, Pump, and Jupiter? Do you see anything that I'm missing? I'd love your thoughts.

Shoot me an email anytime (jasonk@spot.dog) and let me know what you're seeing out there.