Memes Meet Stocks: Inside StonkFun, Pump’s Response and Solana’s Reward Coins

Key Takeaways

• StonkFun out-earned Pump within a week of moving onto Raydium’s LaunchLab, but that lead has faded fast. It took just over half of Solana launchpad revenue in its first full week after the Sep 5 move, but only about 12% by the week to Oct 11, against Pump’s 86%.
• Reward coins set StonkFun apart, paying holders ~2.6x its own revenue and 3.3x what Pump paid. Being paid in legitimate assets gives holders a reason to buy, hold and likely talk them up, and StonkFun’s typical reward coin traded about 4x as much as a standard coin. Pump’s reward coins trailed its normal coins on average.
• StonkFun takes a far bigger cut than Pump, but as its coins grow, much of their trading moves to Meteora. Its pools keep 90% of its coins’ trading on the first day after graduation but only 45% after a week, with Meteora’s concentrated-liquidity pools able to price larger trades better. This looks fixable by working with Raydium on LaunchLab’s pools and incentives.
• STONK is one of the cheapest tokens in our peer set, at 1.2x its past week’s annualized revenue ($129M market cap against $104M of revenue), with ~20.5% of supply burned since July. But 63% of its revenue comes from coins under a day old, and a fifth within a minute of launch, so it depends on new launches, which are falling.
• Pump is the stronger business and deserves the higher multiple, but StonkFun has set the pace on launchpad products. Pump owns its whole pipeline, from app to exchange, so it can innovate on its own rails, copy StonkFun’s successful features easily and, in theory, drown it out. Still, StonkFun’s reward coins outperform where Pump’s do not, and it continues to innovate on product. Hence, we see PUMP as the launchpad sector’s core holding and STONK as a higher-risk option for those wanting more exposure, to be sized accordingly.
• StonkFun started the trend of using tokenized stocks as a currency for memecoins on Solana, connecting two key areas of trading. From September 1 to October 11, stock-paired memecoins, mostly StonkFun’s, made up over 30% of Solana’s tokenized-equity DEX volume.