Over the past few months, the loudest, most outrageous, and yet most real showdown in crypto wasn’t Layer 2s fighting on-chain, nor Binance vs. the SEC — it was between two Solana ecosystem platforms that, on the surface, couldn’t be more different: Raydium and Pump.fun. And in a seemingly “unfair” game, they’ve sparked some serious fireworks.
One’s a veteran decentralized exchange, known for LPs, market making, and project launches.The other is a full-on meme-launch circus, where 100,000 newbies throw SOL every day chasing the next viral PEPE.
One is serious and seasoned.
The other is chaotic and unhinged.
So why are they starting to clash?
Different Starting Points: One’s a Proper DEX, the Other’s a Shitposting Machine
Let’s talk about where these two platforms came from:
Raydium is one of Solana’s earliest and most core AMM + orderbook hybrid DEXs. Since 2021, it’s grown alongside Serum, and as the Solana ecosystem made a comeback, Raydium also had its second wind. Whether it’s IDOs, yield farming, or project launches — Raydium has always been the “serious platform.”
Pump.fun? It doesn’t even have a whitepaper. It launched with just one tagline: “Make memes less elitist.”
The core mechanism? You spend 0.01 SOL, and boom — you launch a token. No whitepaper, no code, no team. Fully automated on-chain issuance.
At its peak, tens of thousands of tokens launched every day. It was pure chaos — real “everyone’s a founder” Web3 playground.
Sounds totally incomparable, right?And yet — they collided.
Collision Point: “User Attention” and “Time Spent”
Raydium is still the liquidity core of Solana. But its main user base is veterans — airdrop hunters, market makers, DeFi farmers, IDO participants — all focused on efficiency and returns.
Pump.fun, on the other hand, hooked the new generation with addictive trading:10 seconds per round, instant launch, instant buy-ins, first-in hype, pure emotion.Its “mint = market open” and “buy = price up” model has created a brand-new trading habit:Think of it as the meme version of Robinhood.
Now here’s the issue — A lot of these users used to spend time trading on Raydium.Now? Pump.fun is sucking up that screen time and attention.
Let’s take a look back at the recent developments of these two platforms, which perfectly validate this point:
First, Pump.fun launched PumpSwap, and its daily trading volume has steadily reached $400 million, getting close to Raydium’s $600 million daily volume.Raydium officially stated that Pump.fun contributed as much as 41% of its AMM revenue in the past month.But after Pump.fun launched its own PumpSwap, Raydium’s traffic dropped sharply, forcing it to launch LaunchLab to “regain control over liquidity.”
At this point, it becomes pretty clear why these two are now in a “showdown.” To put it bluntly:
Raydium plays the game of “rationality + strategy”;
Pump.fun plays the game of “emotion + entertainment.”
But in Solana’s current landscape, user attention and traffic are zero-sum — whoever grabs more eyeballs, wins.
Take this example: you launch a token, say “$ABCDE”, and it goes 100x on Pump.fun. A thousand buyers go crazy with excitement — so, what’s next?
To turn these tokens from “just for fun” into “real tradable assets,” you need:
More buyers
Market-making liquidity
Listing on a DEX
At this point, they realize: “Hey, we can list on Raydium again!”So many projects born on Pump.fun eventually relist on Raydium, adding liquidity, even doing LP incentives and pairing campaigns directly on Raydium.
This brings traffic back to Raydium, which also started to proactively list popular tokens from Pump.fun and support their communities.
But here’s the thing — Raydium isn’t dumb. It has also started experimenting with building its own meme launch platform, aiming to counter Pump.fun with similar mechanics.
Technical Perspective: Is Pump.fun a Liquidity Killer or a Pioneer?
From a technical and economic model standpoint, Pump.fun is actually a highly efficient “automated initial token issuance system”, using a mechanism called a “Bonding Curve”:
The earlier you buy, the lower the price;
The more people buy in later, the more expensive it gets;
If no one buys anymore, the price gradually declines;
The token creator gets no pre-mine, no pump — everything is driven by the community.
This sounds like a fair tool for leveling the playing field,but in reality, it also means — there’s no secondary liquidity, no LP incentives, no depth.
Raydium, on the other hand, specializes in exactly those areas — “maturity,” “market-making,” “stability.”
So Pump.fun became the “source of inspiration”, and Raydium became the “liquidity host.”
They need each other, but they also have conflicting interests. Because if Pump.fun continues to grow, it could eventually embed its own DEX module, and Raydium would be sidelined.
This so-called competition between “different tracks” is actually a reflection of the mindset shift among Solana users:
From “strategic DeFi” to “entertainment-driven memes”
From “profit-driven thinking” to “community-powered momentum”
From “buy-and-hold” to “buy-sell anytime, chase the trend”
Raydium and Pump.fun aren’t truly enemies — they represent different values and development paths within the Solana ecosystem.
Conclusion
If there’s one sentence to summarize this whole thing, it would be this:Pump.fun grabs the emotion and the traffic, while Raydium holds down the foundation and order;and the real winner in the future may be the one that manages to combine both.
