Memecoin launchpads are quiet—degenerates reload

The weird part of the Solana memecoin market right now is that the factory is still running even while the casino floor sounds half-empty. Dune dashboards tracking Solana launchpads still follow daily token deployments across venues like Pump.fun, Moonshot, Boop, Bags, and LaunchLabs, which means new coins are still being minted even after attention cooled. (dune.com) Pump.fun is still the center of gravity because it made coin creation frictionless. Its own fee page says creating a coin costs 0 Solana, and a coin that “graduates” to PumpSwap pays a fixed 0.015 Solana from the coin’s liquidity rather than from the user’s wallet. (pump.fun) That design matters because it turns token launches into something closer to posting than building. When it costs almost nothing to try, people keep throwing out new tickers even when most of them never gather enough buyers to leave the bonding curve stage. (pump.fun) The money is in the trading churn, not in the launch button. Pump.fun says bonding-curve trades carry a total 1.25% fee, split into a 0.300% creator fee and a 0.95% protocol fee, and its PumpSwap pools add another fee schedule that can still pay creators on each swap. (pump.fun) That creator payout became a real argument inside crypto because it concentrates rewards around whoever deploys the token first. In May 2025, The Block reported that PumpSwap’s revenue-sharing program sent 50% of protocol revenue to token creators, or about 0.05% of each eligible trade in Solana. (theblock.co) Critics hated that because abandoned coins and rug-pull coins could still keep paying the original deployer every time somebody traded them. The same report said the backlash centered on the idea that community takeovers were doing the work while the first launcher kept the tollbooth. (theblock.co) You can see the market cooling without seeing it die. The Block wrote on April 8, 2026 that Solana memecoin activity had cooled sharply from its January peak, when Pump.fun was pulling in between $4 million and $6 million in daily revenue, even as the launchpad fight kept flipping between Pump.fun and rivals like LetsBonk. (theblock.co) That rivalry also showed how thin the demand can be underneath the headline numbers. The Block said Pump.fun’s share of graduated tokens swung from roughly 5% to 90% in about two weeks in August 2025, while LetsBonk fell from above 80% to about 3%, which suggests a few heavy deployers and bot clusters can move the whole board. (theblock.co) Even the platforms are acting like they know raw launch count is not enough anymore. Pump.fun has spent the past year changing incentives with creator-fee overhauls, tighter fee controls, and experimental features like “Mayhem Mode,” where an automated trading agent can trade eligible new coins during their first 24 hours. (cointelegraph.com 1) (cointelegraph.com 2) (pump.fun) So the market looks less dead than unloaded. The launchpads still make it easy to print fresh coins, the fee rails still reward whoever can attract volume, and the missing piece is the same one that always restarts these cycles: a new story, a new mascot, or one curator account that convinces traders the next ticker is the one worth chasing.