📝 Editor's Note:

Welcome to OurNetwork's latest. This week, we're covering launchpads, a sector of crypto which has emerged in the last 18 months with the ascendence of Pump.fun. In roughly a year, Pump went from launch to $100M in monthly revenue and 99% dominance in terms of revenue, according to Blockworks data.

That was January 2025. Now, Pump has attracted competitors like Clanker, Pond, and BONK.fun and commands roughly 70% of launchpad revenue. There are also 12 launchpads which generated over $100,000 in revenue whereas at the beginning of the year only Pump and Clanker surpassed that mark.

In short, the launchpad field is showing signs of maturity as new players enter.

Thank you to Alex, Lawrence Mosley, and mar1na for covering some of Pump's key competitors below.

– ON Editorial Team

Clanker | Pond | Bonk.Fun

• Clanker’s fourth version marked a turning point as it rebuilt on Uniswap v4, introducing hooks for dynamic fees, automated buybacks, vaulting, and MEV protection. Since launch, the protocol has processed $3.9B, with 65% of volume in 2025 alone. Daily activity peaked at $116M during rollout and now averages above $10M per day, showing Clanker has matured into durable launch infrastructure.

• Each new version release sparked a surge in token creation: v3 peaked near 16k daily tokens, v3.1 drove another major wave, and v4 added fresh momentum. In total, over 456k tokens have been launched, showing how iteration cycles power Clanker’s growth.

• Clanker’s revenue model takes a flat 20% share of LP fees. Since launch, LPs have earned $39.4M, while the protocol captured $7.9M. This consistent cut via v4 hooks highlights how Clanker monetizes activity while still routing the majority of value to liquidity providers.

• The Pond launchpad has been introducing novel mechanics that blend curation, incentives, and community participation. After pivoting from an AI model factory in mid-2025, the launchpad has recorded a consistent 3,886 average daily user count over the past three consecutive months, with spikes of over 8,000 daily users. Pond's “head-to-head” launch format, where projects vie for community votes before advancing to a raise, fueled the spike.

• Launch sizes are scaling rapidly. Raise amounts have increased five-fold in just three months from $30k (Refinery) to $150k (Blai, DeVoid, and Saider). The growth underscores increasing confidence in Pond’s launch model.

• Day-one liquidity reflects market appetite. Trading volume on launch day has spanned from $420k (Refinery) to $4.4M (Omniacs), showing the scale of market enthusiasm for AI narratives incubated on Base.

• Bonk protocol launched a token launchpad BONK.fun in April 2025 as a key competitor to Pump.Fun. BONK.fun has enabled more than 5M users to create a token for the public (and automated scripts and agents) to trade. Conditional on presale success, roughly 1% of tokens graduate to be offered on the Raydium exchange. BONK.fun holds 7% of the market by count of tokens launched (on the day of writing and going by a 7 day average), which represents a tenth of its lifetime high or a third of the current week’s high.

• Two months after launch, BONK.Fun made a bid for dominance. In July, it was the launchpad of choice for an average 55% (a max of 75%) of deployed tokens on Solana. The differentiating factors were its creator rewards program, and buybacks: spending a share of revenue on BONK tokens and creator tokens.

• BONK.Fun faced fierce competition from Pump.Fun which reinstated itself as sector leader via buybacks and ongoing creator innovation. Ad hoc but sizeable PUMP token buybacks ($112M to date) proved more promising to users than Bonk’s set share of revenue allocated to buyback/burn and ecosystem spend.