Raydium vs PumpFun: Who Owns the Users? | Round Table

Transcript

And I think they've even mentioned on Twitter that they, you know, brought it up to Pump Fund and, you know, Pump Fund didn't really want to even use that pool. They'd rather build their own. So I think in the future like the success is really going to be on how they can actually defend their, you know, dominant position in terms of memecoin trading. Nothing said on Zox Research is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is forformational purposes only and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Pokio, Ryan, and our guests may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed. Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of Zerx Research. Today I'm joined by Jacob Sharples, otherwise known as Zerox

Sharples, um Mark Arjun, and Carlos from the research team. Um happy to have Jacob on. He's been making the rounds on the timeline lately with a bunch of great data. Um, and we definitely want to talk about um, some pump fund related data and a big dashboard that he helped put together. Um, but before we get into any topics today, I do want to do a quick shout out for Permissionless 4. Um, coming to New York uh, this summer, late June. Um, we've been we've already been rolling out the shills for the next the next event. But, uh, I want to make sure that, uh, we we let the listeners know to get your tickets to permission list. Check the link in the description.

As always, the code is 0x10. Get 10% off tickets. We hope to see you there. A bunch of guys from research will be there. Um it'll be a great chance to to meet and mingle um with people from blockworks and around the industry as always. So hope to see you there and let's dive into it. Um so before we get into maybe the crypto specific stuff, I think the general market is maybe a big question mark um and how that relates to the sector and risk on more broadly. Um tariffs are the talk of the town, the talk of the world actually um not just the town. And um this last week and then today uh markets have been doing crazy things. We've got global markets around the world going limit down. Um you know hitting all the circuit breakers. Tons

of crazy things happening. Um some like Cointelegraph internesque news sending markets into a bit of a whirlwind here this morning. I'm curious your guys thoughts just general takeaways um from like the last week, last few days. Uh how are we thinking? How are we feeling? I guess I can start just uh from a price perspective. I think I've been um surprised by Bitcoin's relative strength uh both in regards to like uh the spy and QQQ but also uh in regards to other crypto assets like if you put it in context like um BTC is still above like uh

pre-election levels whereas like Sena and ETH are both like uh seeing lows like you hadn't seen since the beginning of 2024, late 2023. Um, and like if you look at for instance at the soul BTC ratio is down like 30% year to date. Um, and it just speaks in my opinion to uh, Bitcoin following a cycle of its own, which is something that we repeated like in past episodes and like positioning itself as a non-s sovereign form of money. And whereas Salena and Ethereum are just competing in a completely different uh category. And I think like Bitcoin and I think this is something

Mark can speak to a lot better just has like a whole different market structure like with the ETF uh flows that has allowed it to remain a lot more resilient. I want to I want to prompt you there a little further there Mark. We saw I think everyone got out their narratives this weekend around you know Bitcoin is decoupling from risk markets. That's like that was the whole narrative and thought and then Sunday and then into today. Um it it kind of ticked down um maybe maybe sort of lagging the indices that have been down over the past week.

I guess like more broadly on Carlos's point like what are your thoughts there? Is it actually decoupling? Is it actually in its own sort of like special market regime or are we just diluting ourselves right now? I think maybe it's a bit of both. It is like what Carlos mentioned, it is in its own class relative to, you know, Ethereum and Salana. And I'm also surprised it held up so well, especially with five weeks of billions of dollars of outflows from the ETFs. The vehicle that's supposed to be a tailwind for it was actually for a period of time going against it, but it still remained pretty solid. Um the decoupling narrative is not really something I believed in. I you know I I like I track um Bitcoin's correlation to SPY and NASDAQ and um it

like my last report I put out at the earlier this month maybe last week. Um it it was you know pretty high the highest it's been for some time and I think it really depends on the data you're looking at like what how are you measuring it? Are you looking at weekends as part of it? Because you know, you know, unless you're doing with SPY futures and are you doing it a 7-day rolling average, a 30-day rolling average, right? And I think for something like Bitcoin, maybe a shorter time frame might be a little better, like a week, 10 days. And you see here that it's it's becoming more correlated. And this is this and there was a spike again for the first time. Um, Trump mentioned the tariffs in like in late February. And so anytime we see any geol geopolitical events, the correlation

with Bitcoin and equities is increased. Even though it might not see that on paper because it tends to be weekend announcements. So Bitcoin will trade and then um on the on Monday mark on the Monday markets open and Bitcoin's already made most of its moves whereas equities are catching up. So I think that's a little bit of the difference there. But overall, I mean what we're we're at 79K the time of recording. I mean it's it's it's held up pretty pretty well. I mean even gold has pulled back um today. So and from Friday. So you know even that is that's considered a safe haven asset. It's still pulled back. So I don't think the pullback removes Bitcoin from being in that category. It's just it's a time when everybody's reconsidering the

allocations in their portfolio. And Bitcoin is no different. Yeah, it it's a great point. I think the the comparison that a lot of people are looking at now is going back to pre-election to now numbers for a lot of you know if it's indices if it's other crypto and just seeing that like Bitcoin is still hanging out way above the levels that it was at pre-election and lots of other things are trading well below where they were um at that same time um which kind of speaks to that maybe outperformance that we're still seeing here um I guess if we go further like speaking more generally now that markets are kind of like all over the place getting shaken up. What are our outlook like generally and I think we've

talked about Bitcoin a little bit. If you have more to expand there Mark that'd be great but like there's sort of the big three majors here like Bitcoin, ETH and Soul. Um you know like you just mentioned Bitcoin it's still sitting above pre-election levels. ETH has become sort of like this I don't know all of the people who used to be hopefuls it seems like more and more the at least the CT timeline consensus is like oh maybe it actually is dead for real now um and I and I still see optimism around soul but yet you know both e ETH and soul are trading you know well below where they have been over the past few months and you know we're looking at like 2023 type of price levels I I'll just give a quick my quick take on ETH um I kind of see it now was

like the Intel to the Nvidia, right? Once the market leader of the world um now losing out to the new sexy play which is might be soul in that case or could be you know bitcoins the TSMC with the hardware you know and the the analogy between the two is both you know the foundation as well as the board and CEO of Intel know that there's issues and they're turning things around. is restructuring both in EF and in Intel and they're they're doing things to you know they're now hearing the problems a bit late probably a lot of the market was telling them these issues well years in advance maybe 6 months ago and they're now doing things to kind of turn it around but that they're still large

companies and they were the leaders and it was almost like they were mature you know Intel had a dividend um Ethereum was you know burning more fees than it was emitting you you know, and that was a very huge selling point for it. Um, but now I think Ethereum is, you know, it's it's second in terms of DA, it's second in terms of fees, um, REV, it's, you know, people talk about it as still the leader for tokenization where institutions are are tokenizing their assets, but it's, you know, it's still second in that to to provenence and many people don't know that. So, but being second is not an is not a horrible place to be, right? Um it it it still has a

lot of mind share. A lot a lot of the a lot of the L2s use EVMs. A lot of the tokenization problem um pilots use EVM um or Ethereum. Like there is it's still a I don't know what it is now a $200 billion asset roughly whatever the price is. So it's a large asset and it's a startup still. I still think it's in a starter phase and it's pivoting its road map so to speak. Um, I I I don't think it's dead, but I, you know, but I think there's a lot of work and a lot of years to turn this ship around. I think I would agree with that. I mean, there's this saying like he who chases two rabbits catches none, right? And I think that reflects on Ethereum's kind of strategy over the past few years where

they've tried to win as the best money as the best like smart contract platform as the best like DA solution but like you cannot be the best at everything and I think like that's a great point. Uh Mark is raising like they need to like I don't know pivot their strategy to something and then be laser focused on winning. uh that market. Um, one of the things that I was um, discussing previous to this call like uh, is just like I think like in retrospect like the moment Ethereum chose to not scale the L1 was the moment like it was kind of like uh, doomed if you uh, if you will

like I think when it happened like at that time many people like including me like were bullish on the modular like scaling road map with rolloffs but I think like by now it's pretty evident that it's not beneficial for Ethereum DL1 or ED asset and I don't I I don't I think people don't want to see it now like they will never see it. Uh basically I'm I'm curious your guys thoughts here. It seems like now the the plans and the ideas now have shifted to trying to cover all of these bases now. seems and I know Mark you included this as well in your recent report on increasing the gas

limit as well and it it seems like generally the conversation has shifted from like allin L2 scaling to okay we actually we need to scale the L1 we need to scale the L2 like we actually need to scale all the stuff at the same time and we need to do a lot more of it than we've been doing. Um I don't know general thoughts there. It it seems like like you guys have mentioned it's it's a very very tough spot and going back to the previous charts shared like losing in DA to Celestia albeit only from you know really like eclipse a few a few like chains or apps on those chains pumping a ton of that DA um and then losing in sort of the execution legs as well.

Um, you know, it feels like they have now a ton of priorities and they need to scale all of them and I don't know how realistic that's going to be. Um, and it seems like that'll be even more difficult just given like their ability to ship upgrades on time um in over the past few years. I think yeah, you're definitely right. They're being stretched thin as you and Carlos have mentioned. Um I think what's good about the EF being as big as it is is that it has d multiple teams that can work on different aspects at once. Um you know they there's teams working on scaling each of those layers that we said except the hell one. There's teams because I mean that's just pumping the gas limit but there's teams working on paired ass on fusaka thanks to scale

data availability. Um there there's teams working on consensus trying to do you know either single soft finality or bringing that down but I think one of the issues are I I can't as somebody who follows Ethereum it's hard for even me to get a a guys on what the actual path is or how many people want a certain path moving forward because I see on the timeline from some head figures in the Ethereum Foundation and like I just said Ethereum Foundation is big and there's no one consensus view within it. There's individual members who have their own beliefs and some of them want to increase the gas limit on the L1 to maybe a 100 million within the next 12 months which I'm a fan of. And there's some who who are

strongly who hold the strong beliefs that we should do that solo stakers or homestakers need the highest prioritization. And you know I'm not a necessarily a fan of that. I don't think that we the network should be held back by the slowest participants. But then we see something like Solana with the SIMD 228 vote and we got a we got like I think it was Carlos you can correct me 60 low 60s something percent people went favor it or favor of it um was that is that right or so for Cindy 228 uh you you mean yeah what percentage of people were in favor yes for okay so you had like a 74 participation rate and then how you count the boats is you just

count the nonabstaining votes. So among non-abstaining votes, you had a 61% uh in favor of the proposal. And how Salana governance works is that it requires first a threshold of 33% participation rate that was easily surpassed, but then it requires a super majority of yes for the proposal to pass. And that's like twothirds uh of boats of non-obstaining votes and in this case like the 61% fell short of the like 67% that's required for the boat to pass. Yeah. And so so this this is kind of my point like this level of

clarity that we got into what path Salana wants to move forward in it didn't pass but we saw that there was a majority of people like the idea of it. Maybe it has to be tweaked, reintroduced again in a few months. But with with Ethereum, I it's hard to gauge, you know, what percentage of community wants what wants more D scaling, wants more L1 scaling. And you know, my my my gauge for that is Twitter timeline, and that's that's not ideal, right? I'm not saying there's an easy fix for this, but this is another issue that Ethereum is facing as well. This episode is brought to you by Ledger, the global leader in digital asset security. Celebrating 10 years of innovation, Ledger remains the most secure hardware wallet for your crypto

and login. Trusted by 7 million users and securing 20% of the world's digital assets. Follow the link in today's show notes to grab your Ledger now. I think that covers it fairly well. Um I think if we jump to like looking at the broader picture and maybe talking about Salana a little bit here in this in this diagram. Um, in terms of looking at overall like network REV share, um, it's interesting to note that Salana got as high as 80% of at least the the chains that we're tracking here, which should by and large cover the majority of of activity that's happening. Um, I did want to mention that both BNB and Tron have increased significantly as a

percentage of like the overall rev share of chains. Um but when we look in nominal terms, I think it's the story is really more that Salana grew so significantly and then gave so much of it back um that it looks like those chains have increased when in reality Tron has basically just been clipping along at at essentially the same sort of nominal terms um of REV over the past several months and B&B has had some upticks. They've had some some meme coin craze activity going on on their chain lately. Um but by and large it seems their activity their activity level has been relatively consistent whereas Soul had this big spike um and then and then decline. But I think digging into what you wrote recently, Carlos, um, in your Salana update note, um, I mean, a lot of

the the positives for Soul still look relatively the same in that, you know, highly revenue generating applications are increasingly, you know, dominant on Salana. And I think, you know, when you just think about what those might be, I mean, it's still largely trading related. So like pump fund is there, a lot of trading applications, indexes surrounding that activity are there. um and they're incredibly highly revenue generating and profitable. Um so it's not surprising to see that. Um and we've seen Hyperlquid tick up as well. It's been another big winner. Are there other other big takeaways like what's the what's our outlook in and view and thoughts on Salana here and going forward?

Um, one of the big highlights just for me and we can discuss about how to interpret this but app revenue has been more resilient than network rev. If you look at network like rev in March it was like $71 million. That's down like 87% from January's figure. Um, and most of Solena's network rev comes from trading applications and because you benefit a lot like from consent from contentious transactions and users trying to get the best execution price and like events like the network like the Trump memecoin like definitely favor

uh me and network rev in this regard. But then I've been pleasantly surprised by um application revenue has definitely declined but it has not declined at the same rate as network rev. And if you look at the ratio of application revenue divided by network rev what you will find is that March was an all-time high for Sena uh it was around 1.84 84. And what that means is that on average, Solena applications are earning like $1.84 per every $1 of network rev uh today. uh which like at the end of the day when you look at like um what is the

success of a network you're not just looking at what the stakeholders of the network earn meaning token holders and validators but you also want to look at crucially what businesses within the ecosystem uh or applications are earning and to me this speaks to uh salen applications achieving product market fit and even if in declining market conditions, I think we have seen like a pretty good level of like like a good floor of of activity. What I will say and what I don't like is that March was the first month uh probably since September of last year where

year-over-year growth uh is looking uh very bad. Like if you look at February, like year-over-year growth was still pretty pretty high in this chart, but like if you look at March, uh year-over-year growth isn't looking as great. And then maybe some of those growth prospects are getting priced in. I think that that app revenue to network RV figure that's kind of kind of falls into the fat protocol thesis.

And then I it's probably not just for Salana but for the other smart contract the other major smart contract ones as well. Barton um like it it shows that probably there's a still a lot if that trend continues which I think it will it shows there's probably a lot of money to be made in the applications more so like maybe higher beta plays both fundamentally and just price-wise. I mean I tweeted out today something um Jupiter the perex I mean it has other platforms as well but Jupiter in the last 24 hours made more fees so not revenues but made more fees than Solana Ethereum Tron and pumpf fun combined right so this is kind of like showing you how despite like falling RV despite these stuff like some of some

applications can still like gain market share and be seen as more like defensive I think that's interesting thing. Um maybe hinging off of that, like I want to dive deeper here and we've got Jacob on to talk more specifically about a bunch of Pump Fund data. Um speaking of highly revenue generating apps, Pump Fund has been one of the killers there. The downside for I think people interested in the liquid token space is that there is no token for Pump Fun. Um so the associated upside you might have had to find that in other places. Um but you know as you mentioned Mark there are there's other venues where that has been possible. You know there's Jupiter tokens, there's DEX tokens, there's

there's other things out there. Um but when we think about Pump Fun, I guess I will jump to real quick. They recently brought back or you know working on bringing back live streaming. They dropped um an update that the live stream component of the platform is coming back alongside a moderation policy which um supposedly they had the first time around but maybe was not clear um and they just didn't have the resources to properly sort of watchdog um the activity and handle the influx of of craziness that was going on um in the initial concept. But it is interesting to see them bring this back. I know in a recent interview, Alon mentioned that the team has grown to something like 50

or 60 employees. Now, um I'm sure they've also maybe beefed up um some of their backend systems to maybe do automated detecting of certain types of things that go against the rules outlined here, but um basically it prohibits all of the content that people were outraged about um on Twitter back when live streaming blew up on Pump. So, violence, harassment, sexual content, etc. Um this isn't surprising. when we talked about it back then, I I think we kind of saw this as an inevitability. If their desire was to uh eventually like have this be a core part of the platform, they were going to have to implement, you know, some policies and guidelines um to sort of keep up with social sentiment and prevent people from, you know, writing off writing off

the platform entirely and and getting people um to to keep using the platform. As we've seen with other like major media platforms like YouTube and and Twitch, though, in their case, it's usually to keep advertisers on the platform. In this case, it's to prevent community outrage. Um, but jumping from there, I guess what I want to dive into today as far as pump goes, and we have a bunch more data now that we have a pump fund dashboard um on the Blockworks data site, is a couple of questions. One, they just launched Pump Swap a few weeks ago. Um, digging into a little bit of like whether or not that's been successful is maybe a first question. I think everyone is looking around and there was a ton of like, you know, I spoken with the Radium guys on Twitter a little bit here and there around like

whether this is like a winner or not, like whether they're going to whether pump is going to be able to take volumes away from Radium. Um, I think in the case of of new pairs, it's kind of evident that was going to happen. We did have a chart from a while back that I'll just throw up real quick. um where we were looking at volumes by pool age and just younger like less than 30 days um pools were seeing a significant bulk of the trading volume. Um and when you looked at like pump fund trading volume as a percentage of total uh radium volume it was it got up to a massive like some at some cases like 70% of total volumes um at the peak. So it's not surprising that that Pumphone would go after some of that. But um I guess

Jacob, I want to let you talk here some of your like big takeaways and key findings as far as the pump swap launch and just generally like trends that we're seeing in pump fun. Um what what are the things that we should be paying attention to? Well, I think the first thing is I think the success of Pump Swap is really going to be determined based off of how successful Radium's launchpad is, which I think is called Launch Labs. Um I mean Pump Fund's main kind of thesis on kind of launching their own own AM own AMM is that um essentially you know the token life life cycle the way it goes is you know they take essentially a 1% fee on the bonding curve and then once that you

know reaches 85 soul acrewed in the bonding curve that used to go to radium but pump fund would also take this kind of six soul graduation fee and that was the end of the token on terms of monetization for Pump Fun for these like tokens and you know like you've seen all these big tokens that have launched from Pump Fund with you know a billion dollar market caps and you know huge trading volume and Pump Fund's not really getting any of that. So like their main kind of you know motivation for this has been pretty much to try to capture that fee which has they've you know launched their pools which are kind of 25 bips which corresponds to exactly the same amount of trading fees as the radium pool. Um, but also like they also took away the graduation fee, which is like a

six soul type of fee. And I think over time what you're going to see is like they're going to have to like really, you know, pump some volume out to actually make up for that because that graduation fee, like, you know, at its peak in January, February of this year, it was about like $1.5 million of revenue per day. And like that's that's going to be pretty hard because the five bips that they're getting off of um the trading volume itself is, you know, very small and insignificant for that. And kind of like what you're looking at right now is that it's really just an extension of their bonding curve platform. Like there isn't really any volume for any of these non-mecoin pairs yet. And I mean I think it makes sense on the surface like there's one pool

option. It's 25 bips. there's 20 bips to LPS, five to the actual protocol. It's just not going to be competitive with, you know, the other existing platforms out there that are charging one BIP on a, you know, a sole USDC pair. And like we've kind of seen that as well. Like there was a bunch of these tokens that kind of had these bridging over events and there's been very little volume whatsoever on them. Like for example, like the chart you're showing, it's about, you know, I think the max was like 300k on a particular day. I think probably the first day or second day and other than that it's been pretty insignificant and like I don't I don't really see how they can be competitive in terms of that and like there's some like other types of things like for

example like you know there's this thing in with memecoin volumes that at least for AMMs they have to kind of think about because they actually incur a bit of price risk in terms of collecting the fees. So I can give like an example like Radium and Orca the way that they collect fees is based off of like a periodic of time. So it doesn't happen after every single trade. Essentially the fees get acred into the LP and then after a certain threshold or a certain amount of time that has passed they'll actually collect them. But you can imagine obviously with like volatile assets like memecoins the time that the trade takes place can also differ by the time that you know the price of when

they actually collect those fees. So one thing that pump funds done is that every single trade they actually take that you know five bipe asset of the pool at the time of the trade. And that's really just for kind of like this memecoin trading. Like you wouldn't need this type of logic for, you know, if you're doing a sole USDC pair because you're not that concerned about the fact that, you know, a token can go from, you know, one to zero in like a matter of hours and you won't be able to collect any of the actual revenue. So you kind of see this happen on like, for example, Radium like they might have volumes and revenues reporting this, but the actual cash flow that goes to the treasury or to the buybacks can actually differ quite a bit because of that.

Uh, I think there's probably some trade-off because it's adding additional logic to the every single trade that happens on the AMM and like you know the pools are pretty vanilla and I think with Radium itself like they're pretty diversified in terms of like they're still getting a decent amount of volume from Soul USDC. So I think they can probably be pretty competitive in terms of the pricing on terms of the you know their launchpad itself. Um, there's been quite a lot of launchpads, you know, in the last probably six months. Like there's been Flaunch and Clanker and whatnot on base and there's even been a launchpad called Pumpkin. Fun. Yeah, that's an actual name. Um, but none of them have really generated anything.

It's like, you know, they offer all these creator fees, all these cool features, but there's no attention on them. So, you kind of have this cold start problem. Whereas Radium, I think like it's a pretty established deck. I can't think of another DEX has, you know, the size of Radium that has launched the launchpad. And I think they can be pretty competitive on the fee. And I know Pump Fund, um, they kind of mentioned in the future they're going to add this creator fee to the I think the 25 BIPS. I don't know if they're taking it out of the LP or if the protocol fee, but I think they're going to probably have to eat that fee in the future because I think Gradium's probably going to offer that. And I think they even mentioned on Twitter that they, you know, brought it up to Pump Fund and,

you know, Pump Fund didn't really want to even use that pool. They'd rather build their own. So I think in the future, like the success is really going to be on how they can actually defend their, you know, dominant position in terms of memecoin trading. Ledger is the global leader in digital asset security, trusted by 7 million users and securing 20% of the world's digital assets. In recent years, Ledger has built a comprehensive ecosystem of products and services, making digital ownership more secure and accessible for everyone. Ledger's newest devices, Ledger Stacks and Ledger Flex, introduced the world's first secure touchcreens, making it easier and safer to manage your transactions and assets. Alongside Ledger Stacks and Ledger Flex, they have also launched the Ledger Security Key app, offering a safer alternative to traditional passwords and enhancing your

digital security. Follow the link into today's show notes to get started with Ledger today. I want to prompt a question here. I think that was all great and you pointed to some some thoughts that I think a lot of people have been having. One has been around like who owns the user. Can these platforms effectively like leverage their brand to continue to like build um you know have their audience continue to use their platform and then build their trading volumes around that. And I think with Pump, all we've seen so far is that like if you just move the venue for the trading of these tokens to pump's own AMM, like of course then they'll capture the fees on it. Um, no problem because people are they just want to trade the

assets. So if they're on radium or if they're on Pump, like I don't think that really matters to them. Um, but it opens up this broader question and I think we've talked about this metric and I know you've circulated this chart before, Jacob, but this question of like do trading bots like own some of the end user relationship with Pump, does it really matter if Pump owns liquidity? Because, you know, if some large portion of people doing a ton of this memecoin trading are using trading bots, they don't really care where the venue is, right? They're making a trade through Photon or Bolex or Axiom. it doesn't matter to them if it's sourced from, you know, if it's Launch Lab in the future or if it's Pump Fun. Um, they're just they're hitting the buttons in their Telegram pot. Um, and I think you can

ask the same question of Radium. What are you guys thoughts there? Like on the one hand, I could see Pump Fund using this initial model as like a first step of we'll just capture the the the memecoin volumes, but if they can then build out the decks further and have more offerings with like different um different fees for different types of pairs, um you know, maybe the people who trade memes on the platform will then also trade, you know, their soul and their USDC and their other assets on the platform as well. Um, but I think this question here kind of brings that it it opens up a broader question of like are these people really interacting with the pump fund? Are they like loyal to pump fun or do they just you know they're just using whatever front-end venue if it's Jupiter, if it's a trading bot,

what have you, and they don't really care about Pump Fun or Radium. Yeah, I think an interesting chart is we have a similar kind of chart for Radium. So like on the radium user I think tab there's an trading platform chart and last time I looked at it it dropped to 0%. It was originally I think 10% of Radium's volume was going through these trading platforms and then the day after the pump you know swap launched I think it went down to 0%. So I don't think they're loyal to wherever the actual liquidity is coming from. And I think also a lot of these Telegram bots, trading platforms, they've already integrated Radium before. So I think

they don't have to worry about having to like, you know, get a deal to have this. Yeah. So you can see it just dropped off a cliff after that particular day. And like I think that's already integrated in a lot of these platforms. So once Launch Lab comes out, I don't think it's going to be a huge burden. And I think some of these already have like the filter of Radium pools because there are some meme coins that still launch on Radium even though it's not really a fair launch system or bonding curve system. But I think I think the infrastructure is there and it's probably, you know, the biggest competitor I think to pumps dominance.

Like I said, one of the things that I was surprised about this year about the removal of the six uh soul fee like for the graduation. My intuition would have been that memecoin creators are not that sensitive to like fees because Jacob you also alluded to like um rating competing on maybe lowering fees uh to take market share from pawn fund but I don't know like it for from my perspective I don't feel like if you remove some basis points out of like the trading uh experience you would be incentive device

to move over to another application. Like I feel like out of all like uh memeco like out of all traders like probably memecoin traders and creators are the least sensitive to like uh fees and so in that regard I feel like fun has a pretty um huge mode when it comes to like owning the user and I I really don't understand why they would remove like the six soul fee like I'm I'm not as deep like in the memecoin like uh world, but I I I would feel like they would have the same amount of volume had they kept

that. Yeah, I'm not too sure. I think I think they alluded to kind of the fact that well one they took the six soul away and then they also reduced the time that it took to graduation. I think there was a waiting period I forget how long but now it's instant. I think originally that was a bit controversial as as well and then I think some people have kind of gotten used to it. I think like the interesting thing is like this creator fee. I think you know I don't know why they didn't launch it when pump swap came on line like the day one. I think like you know it just makes sense like there's been a lot of people wanting to have a memecoin but they also don't want to have to sell and you know hear the backlash on Twitter and whatnot

and they want to have some type of fee that actually like you don't have to worry about exiting out of your position with and I'm surprised that that didn't come and I think like I've said radium I think probably will launch it on day one and I think that's the only way you probably can like go after a pump fund is through that creator and kind of migrate the users but there is like a problem of like who's starting like is it a chicken and egg problem with the the people that are actually creating these tokens? Like we have a page dedicated on kind of this and once you like get into the weeds of that it's like there's a few people that launch all these tokens like 30,000 tokens they don't really have a huge hit rate like some 1% there's been a person that's

launched some you know 10,000 11,000 tokens doesn't have a single graduation rip and like it's just kind of spammy like it's hard to it's hard to know the incentive for launching these amount of tokens and the amount of cost it would cost to like do that and it it is interesting because like there's no creator fee. So like yeah. Yeah. I think this brings up an interesting point and I was trying to show some of that on the token stats page as well, but I do think that this changes like how behavior is incentivized. So, previously, I think it was incredibly common for tokens to basically be like if you if you graduated, that was very much like it's

either dead or it's running to some absurd number. And I think a lot of times it's whoever if it's someone who's making the token or if it's just someone who's betting on it. Like they're very focused on like hitting the graduation. Um, and I guess in that case of if you're the creator, right, you got some kickback when the graduation was successful. some amount of fee was paid to um the the token creator in that case, right? Um I if if that model changes and now you're like as a creator you get you are benefited personally if this thing grows and then does a ton of volume um I do think that changes at least the behavior of how these things are interacted with and it's you should see less of this activity where someone creates a token you know pumps it up to

like whatever that 60 80k market cap uh limit is just to get the graduation um and then it just dies because they they don't care about it anymore. Um, you know, you could see a larger focus on like if this is a meme coin attached to some trend, like you want this thing to just like grow as big as it possibly can. Um, and and maybe that leads to like less explicit like just constant pump and dups. And I think we're seeing this a little bit at least like the graduation rate ticked up significantly like nearly doubled um earlier here. I don't know if when did the when did pump swap officially go live? Was it late March? I think. Yeah, I think probably over a week ago now. So, this it looks to be tracking that change that maybe

the behavior has shifted a little bit. It's hard to say if that's entirely from this change alone or if just like, you know, some meme coins have been doing a more doing well. Like, you know, Fartcoin is is doing positively again in recent weeks. So, maybe it's just like sentiment has shifted a little bit. But I do think it's interesting maybe to call out a little bit of um maybe they're trying to force people's hands in terms of the behavior of how they interact with these. Um but the other point you give is interesting around the people creating these tokens like um I've scrolled through this as well and like these top creators, they don't historically have better graduation rates than like the broad like longunning average. Like slightly less than 1% seems to be pretty common. And and I think when you look at a lot of

these, they're doing worse than that in most cases. And these guys are doing thousands and upon thousands of token launches. There's maybe a few cases where they've got a higher rate, but I guess you you'd expect that if you're doing thousands of tokens, like you might have some edge or community or other, you know, social connections to like have a a better chance of of graduating tokens on the or to uh to Radium historically. But yeah, I don't know.

What are you guys thoughts there in terms of just like I think this will be a continued focus for a lot of these platforms. So like FL you mentioned earlier Jacob like Flanche and some of these other platforms like their idea was we need to do like fee sharing with creators or fee sharing with the protocol different mechanisms there that's what like I think the pumpkin one as well as like GoFundMe have played around with like protocol revenue share and then having like a token for the base protocol. Um, and then this change from pump as well. It's like it's like a to user behavior on the platform, although they don't have a token yet. There's no like protocol revenue share. Um, do you guys think that that can really be a differentiator here or are we expecting

to just see, you know, the winners and the like dominators continue to do well? I mean, personally, I do think it can be a differentiator, but it's harder if you're not on Solana because that's just where most of the Beamcoin activity is. Probably why Flunchy, even with this, you know, innovative thing with the unis swap v4 hooks. I thought it was pretty clever, pretty innovative and kind of like wanted to change user behavior like you said, but maybe not the right maybe not the right chain and maybe not the right timing for it, but it's also, you know, symbolic of what made pumpf fun in the first place with the bonding curve to kind of make it more fair for users and these other protocols when wanting to share fees and have a fair launch as

well, you know, fair launch funy. So, I think it's it's in the same vein, right? Um, so I do think it'll make a difference and when Pump. on launch. It was originally used by a few people and then it became more known that this bonding curve was something that helped protect you and then people had to learn about the bonding curve and then once enough people knew about it then other people just took it at face value that it was a fair site and they built their reputation from that and I do think like other platforms who you know implement these kind of mechanisms these fee sharing and u more long-term incentive aligned um like protocol designs will should capture some market share Yeah, I mean there have been some attempts like by new chains even for

instance Eclipse is discussing ways to how to redistribute like me back to the application instead of like just like um being kept by the sequencer by the validators on like a chain um and trying to add value to the application in that way. But the problem is that you incur some tradeoffs by moving away from like as Mark mentioned from Sena when it comes to main coins. Uh and those trade-offs are pretty huge. Like I can imagine like for instance in the case of Eclipse even if you redistribute all of the sequencer fees back to the application. I think an application would be better off like on Solena just

earning their normal fees they charge users than because it's a it's a much larger pie and a much larger like um like TAM let's just say than just being on a chain where there's no activity and like having that like uh advantage let's just say but then when you look at the absolute numbers what you're earning is nothing comparable to what you could earn on a chain like Salena where all the users and liquidity are. Yeah, I think I think that's a great point. Um, and I want to share some data here on soldex volumes and trading bots, but I think that exemplifies a shift that we saw going from like 23 to 2024 where

memecoins like really took off on Salana and prior to then like Telegram bot trading was mostly happening on Ethereum. um you had that like maybe start to take off on some other EVM chains as well like Binance Smart Chain and and even Bass. But once memes went crazy on Soul. Um you saw this big shift, right? Like Bonkbot, you know, even Unibot moved to Soul and then renamed to Trojan. Um, and now we have like Photon, Bolex, there there's a ton of them um that have all been competing over the Salon volumes because like you mentioned the aggregate like nominal amount of trading volume that they're competing for is so significant um that the potential revenues are massive. What I think is interesting to see is that like specifically for Telegram bots and

their share of Salana Dex volumes, they've been pretty consistent over the past year or so where as a percent of total DEX volume, it's been anywhere from like 5 to 10% and as a share of like specifically memecoin volume, which is basically what anyone who's using a Telegram trading bot is trading, um they've been anywhere from like 10 to 20% of total meme volumes. Um, so I think like when you know that the nominal numbers are in the billions, like billions of volume a day and you're competing for, you know, 10 to 20% of that with a 1% fee slapped on um to volume for every trade that they use.

You know, generally I think most of these bots they're they're charging 1%. Um maybe they're taking home like 70 or 80 bips net after like incentives and other things, but the revenue opportunity for them has been massive. Um and so to your point like it's it's unsurprising to see um all these apps like jump and compete for you know these highest contention highest volume um spaces. Um what I think is interesting as well like more recently and in the chart that we showed on on pump funds like you know where where users are trading from um with you know third party apps being like 30 to 40% of activity. Axiom has been like a new entrant here. And they're they've got, you know, memecoin trading on Salana and

maybe other chains, maybe not quite yet, but also Hyperlquid Pers as well as like you can earn yield via um you can earn yield on USDC via margin. Um so they they baked in a couple of things. What I think is interesting is that there is there's a potential that like you could see a shift in activity of if Hyperlid continues to become this like great venue for trading. I do wonder if you know the users on these on these bots and apps like if if the apps are just going to continue to provide like what the best venue is like the users don't necessarily care what the app or the chain that they're on is. They just want to trade where the action is happening.

So, um, if all of these front ends and interfaces that people are using are just, you know, oh, now we're tapping into Hyperlid, like it wouldn't be surprising to me to continue to see like more activity and like this sort of flywheel effect, um, happen there where it's like, okay, you know, activity is moving here, okay, more activity moves there because activity has moved there, and then now like the most, you know, liquid and highly traded assets are there as well. Um any other thoughts like maybe more generally on just Pump Radium like this clash of the Titans um and where they're headed? I'm sort of surprised that Pump didn't kind of go into the trading platform side of things first rather than the AMM. It seems like there's a lot more I mean there's just a lot more fees to be captured in that

type of side. like you're kind of looking at like this power law distribution of kind of traders that you know there's going to be a handful of people that probably contribute about you know 20 30% of all fees for these type of platforms that just trade you know all day. Um and like we have a chart in the dashboard as well that I honestly think is one of the most interesting parts of the pump fund dashboard. Uh it's uh it's looking at kind of like the amount of fees that are being generated for a pump like a pump fund trade. So a bonding current plus AMM. So you can think about it as like there's a bunch of actors in kind of like this pipeline. We don't include Salana or Jetto right now, but in the future we will. So like for example, you

know, Telegram bots, trading platform bots on the financials, like they are close to capturing almost more of the fees on pump fund trades than Pump Fund itself, which is, you know, kind of an interesting fact. I mean it's it's pretty much a factor that you know there's like 10 11 trading bots and kind of taking the collective of that but I think like that kind of dynamic kind of shows that like there is quite a lot of fees to be captured on that type of side especially on the user front end side that we typically overlook in crypto for for an application that was you know the leading one last year in Texas of all apps leading by revenue users you

name it. Do we think that they need a token? Like the team was raking in hundreds of millions of dollars keeping it for themselves essentially. There's no protocol sharing like what's the incentive to launch a token for form fun. I mean I know what the incentive is but do we think that the trade-off is worth it? I don't think it's uh worth it at this point. Um I think uh I think the strategy was correct. I think people give a lot of um like a lot of people in the Sena community view Pony a negative light um especially like in recent months saying that it's a net negative for the ecosystem. Um I don't think that's true.

Like if you look at uh pom fun um they brought in millions of dollars in like revenue and they were selling that soul but at the end of the day it's a business right like that's what they're supposed to do and in crypto we usually take these like maybe socialist stand sometimes where we think like applications shouldn't make money and look at them as extractive when in reality like that's the whole point like the whole point is to have like successful businesses on chain and you cannot just like pay the bills with soul. So I think like I think bomb pon strategy was correct not not launching a token and like it was like the rational choice like just to keep it

for themselves and I mean what's the incentive to launch a token it would just been extractive people would have been mad after it went down and then it would just add a necessary con controversy for the team in my opinion I I think I generally agree with Carlos here I do see the po like me personally I would have loved to have bid a pump fund token so like I can understand the like obsession or argument of like man they should have done a token because I wanted to buy it but I I think the reality is that like they didn't necessarily need to right the the idea clearly took off they made a ton of money they like didn't need to raise funds for anything um I mean they went through alliance so they had um you know

they had some funding to kind of start things out and they ra you know they surely raised some capital from some investors. Um, and the idea idea took off pretty quickly. So, um, yeah, the only other reason would just be to like, you know, I could see the value in maybe launching a token and then trying to like continue to steal market share or vampire attack another platform if they struggle to do that without launching a token. you know, if the goal is to like take down all the Salana Dexes and like take over the ecosystem, like, you know, maybe you could use that as a incentivization mechanism and like really like start to steal market share from other players. Um, but I don't know that they necessarily need to because they've been just so successful. Like it's hard to say that they should launch

a token when they've made hundred like like Carlo said, they made hundred of million hundreds of millions. They have plenty of funding. Like they could build out whatever they want to expand this product further. All right, we can uh we're getting near the end here. That's I think we talked plenty about pump fun. I think that was great. Um diving into the dynamics. I guess what I want to ask more generally now like looking forward and I've asked this question a lot of different ways and recently we've talked a lot about like stable coins, tokenization, different things along those lines with DAS and the institutional focus behind us. Um I think I want to ask outside of that realm like where do we think like the next interesting like great opportunities can arise from in crypto?

ignore stable coins, ignore these tokenization things that we've been talking about for weeks now. Um, you know, Carlos, I know you just recently wrote about SVM chains. Mark, you just wrote about um a Dex on SUI and like, you know, its relationship within the SU ecosystem. I think these tend to be common ideas, right? Like new chains come out, people get excited about them. Generally, it's been like historically a very good trade, right? Like if you look at you know 23 24 25 then like salana suite hype like those were things that did well. You could argue that hype is just an application but now they're building the hypervm. Um so I think we've seen like this consistency here in um you know new chains that gain dominance have been very good um to to buy. So I guess where are we looking and

what are we thinking about going forward? I know you mentioned earlier apps could be the winners but um you know there's no pump fund token. So what apps? Um I think I I'm seeing like two main like opportunities if you will. Like the first trend I'm seeing uh is apps sort of converging upon the same design and diving into this like multi-product that we've been talking about lately. So for instance, Camino launched their swap product that leverages Bits Express relay and it's essentially using just an offchain auction uh with market makers to find the best price execution for traders and often even returning a tip to the user.

Um, Drift also launched like their Swift protocol or announced it which is also using like an offchain auction like Jupiter also something similar with RFQ. Um, you have Dflow on Salena like also with conditional liquidity trying to solve for toxic order flow. So I think like a big trend is just trying to solve for this big issue which is toxic orderflow uh specifically and I think like on an L1 with permissionless validators like Sena you cannot do that uh very easily so you need to rely on some offchain components and I think that's why we've been seeing also new chains like with novel designs that are

also trying to solve for the same issue but with a different approach. So for instance, Atlas is a new chain like a new SBML2 that's being developed by the Ellipsis Labs team who is behind the Finenix club and Salena and they are like they specifically chose to build an L2 because you have a centralized sequencer and that sequencer can have like an opinionated ordering of transactions which you which you cannot just have like on a chain with like permissionless validators. And if you do have like u opinionated ordering of transactions on an L1, you typically have to restrict the valer set uh quite extensively and hyperlquid is one

example of this where you have a very uh small valer set that can allow you to have like good price execution. a Fogo uh is a new chain that's also having like a permission validator set and again the same reason is there's no other really way to reduce toxic orderflow. Um so yeah that's one of the trends that I'm seeing like just teams trying to figure out ways to reduce like uh me and improve onchain liquidity. Um and then the other thing I I I I think there are some good like farming opportunities like if you look at Salena there are protocols like Raex um or Exponent Finance. I think Luke

talked about Radex previously which is like sort of like Pendle but on Sena I think that's an interesting protocol. you have like new novel designs that are under discussed in my opinion such as loop scale which is like if you look at the credit uh or the lending landscape like most protocols like basically since compound popularized the poolbased design in 2018 like we haven't moved past that poolbased design for money markets and like loop scale and other protocols are trying to be novel approaches like credit order books and I think That's really interesting. And right now that like prices are down, like the trading activity is maybe not

as exciting as it was a few months back, maybe it's interesting to just experiment with this like sort of more boring applications. Uh, and maybe they can in the future have some interesting like airdrops. You can just do interesting strategies with stable coins or like with soul or whatever. Yeah, I'm going to piggyback on Carlos's first one in a combination, his point of a lot of these apps vertically integrating and adding offchain solutions and then also these SVM chains coming up, these L2s like Eclipse or Atlas, these L1s like Fogo X1 like if you can if you like look

at a if you look at us both of those trends and kind of look back to like 2020 when a lot of EVM chains are popping up like you know Avalanche, Cchain, you know, Binance like look at the applications that are going to do the same thing that applications did back then but just for SVM so you know Metapplex for instance they're they're on Salana they have the NFD standard they're monopoly they're they're on Eclipse they're on X1 what I mean what's going to stop them from you know what's the hindrance from stopping them from going on Atlas or Fog or these other chains too and why would they not use them as well you know and things like you know that's that vertical integration And also they have Aura coming out with their you know I call that their own like DA layer as well um

for Salana. Um I also see Jupiter as the same way like why would Jupiter not also launch on these other chains especially with their plans to have Jupet to be an aggregator of multiple chains and you know obviously SVM chains are going to be the lowest hanging fruit for them because that's what the that's what the base is built out on. So I think look for the apps that have already vertically integrating. Maybe they're on Eclipse already. Maybe they're on another maybe they have plans for another chain and you know run that same playbook that we saw some of these other apps do with Ethereum and all these other EVM chains launch and proliferate and now not only are they diver diversifying within their own integrated stack but they're diversifying with different chains as well. So I think

that's one to look out for. I I think I somewhat uh will disagree with that take in the sense that I think like the storyline with the EVM will play out very differently very different to the SBM storyline in the sense that Salena developers are laser focused on keeping users and liquidity on the L1. So if you look at the applications that have launched in Eclipse, you have like you're right, you have Metapplex, you have Orca, you have Lefinity, but if you look at the leaders of Sena DeFi today, like in each of their respective verticals like Jupiter, Camino, Radium, etc., none of these applications have

launched on new SBM L2s. And I think that reflects on their laser focused efforts on keeping like users and liquidity on the L1. And that's sort of what as what I was alluding to earlier. For instance, Camino doesn't want to launch on like Atlas uh to solve for toxic order flow. They want to launch their own solution on Solena so that users stay there and and and they can maintain that liquidity. Um, I think there's like this probably negative self- selection bias where applications on Sena that haven't done very well or have maybe lost a marketer are expanding to other

SBM chains because they are losing on the unlike the Solana L1 if that makes sense and and they're trying to make make up for it uh in another way. So I think that in that way it will play out differently different different than the EVM plot where you have like app and unis swap launching on every single EVM that that that launches and dominating that market. Whereas in Salan I I don't see that like ambition from the leading teams to launch a new SBM chains. I'm seeing more like a focus on keeping the users and the liquidity on the L1. Uh but that being said, I think that competition is great and that adless fog or whatever can can be net beneficial in

the sense that you have like real competition and and and efforts to like solve toxic order flow in another way. One thing I'll say is that I spoke to to the Fogo team and then some of them said that they aren't really targeting like Salena applications like they're going after like a new market essentially. So, so I don't I don't think we'll see many Salana apps launching launching on FOGO to be honest when it launches. That's actually a really good point. So, so maybe maybe more so the apps that either don't care about liquidity as much like Metaplex with just NFD standards and minting and then maybe ones that try to solve the liquidity fragmentation among

SVMs like the Jupiter with Jupets. So, yeah, solid point Carlos. Yeah, I think I think you make good points Carlos and I'll maybe add some context there as well. Like I think the EVM example like we saw a lot of vanilla copy pasting of like you know these 10 L2s didn't really make any you know modifications to the EVM they just like launched it's like same throughput same initial design and so it's like sure let's just copy all these same apps over there. Um I I don't it doesn't really appear that that's the case here on the SVM side of things where they're just like straight up copy pastacing Salana like you mentioned Carlos they're trying to specifically solve for spec you know specific problems in some cases if it's toxic

orderflow maybe they have permission validator sets maybe they're making other tweaks um to the design um which you know might make focusing on those two like slightly different ecosystems a little bit harder and then the other point I want to make is like I think historically we do see that native applications to an ecosystem tend to sort of outrank like the copy pasters around the world. Um like even if you look at base, right? Like Aerodrome kind of grew up to the top really quickly and and outclassed unis swap even though unis swap is like you know the classic like let's just drop unis swap on this new EVM chain. Um, I think you just you just tend to see that like that laser focused team that's specifically interested in that one ecosystem is able

to, you know, more effectively rally a community. And obviously then like if they have a token that's not competing with like the activity or the revenues or um things happening on other chains, then it's like more relevant to the people that might want to buy or trade or stake or lock it or what have you. Um, so I think those are maybe some points in favor of Carlos' idea, which I think makes I mean I think there's points to both sides, but I do think what he's saying makes sense pretty strongly in this case. Jacob, I'm curious about your thoughts. We don't get to hear from the data guys. Outside of Dan Smith, who's very loud on the timeline and in the chats. Um, what are you excited for? What what apps? What chains? Where are you looking? Uh, right now probably honestly Fluid just to name

one single app. I'm pretty in I'm pretty pretty interested in more of the institutional kind of side of the trading and lending and that's kind of what fluid is mainly built for. Uh we just actually just published a dashboard last week on that. So some of the data is pretty fresh in my mind and it's like something like I think most of the data is coming from me bots coming from market makers. I think right now especially if we go kind of through this little slump period if you want to call it that in crypto with kind of like depressed volumes for a bit. I think kind of this institutional side I think is still a pretty good bull case especially for legislation the next couple years hopefully whatnot and I think like I think fluid especially them kind of branching out to more of these

chains now which I know obviously Carlos just mentioned probably not the best thing but at least in the EVM landscape it's one of the ways you kind of have to survive and I think them branching out to now base which I think they're going to be launching a DEX pretty soon on that side cuz as of right now it's just Ethereum and arbitum. But on the lending side, I think kind of institutional side, I'm pretty interested in that. And then also, like you said, there isn't really much tokens on the kind of like this user interfacing kind of this like, you know, trading platform. So, there's not really a lot of tokens on that, but I think Axiom in the future probably be launching a token or some sort of that with a currently running a point system.

And I think something like that where the users are completely controlled in terms of that is going to be pretty interesting on the retail side of things. Awesome. I'm going to plus one Axiom. I think it's interesting. I think they're they're doing a lot of things right that I think trading bot teams maybe should have been trying to focus on um over the past, you know, year. Um but we'll see how that one plays out. It's they've been they've been having a strong start so far. Um all right, I think it's about time to close it out. You did mention depressed volumes. I think we've got a bunch of depressed personalities on the timeline. Everyone is, I would say, probably crying in the casino um lately. Um any any big takeaways outside of the apps? I think

my big one would just be maybe log off and touch some grass if you are ripping your hair out right now. It's a big day for liquidators essentially. It's like the main winners in the last week. So, I know there was a big close out on like an a position, but that's pretty much the only people that are really happy. That's fair. You guys heard it here from Jacob the data wizard himself. Just simply don't get liquidated and you'll probably be fine. Um hopefully we will see some of you guys at permissionless this summer. Reminder to get your tickets. It's 0x10. And thanks for tuning in. And thank you guys for coming on today. It was great.

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