Data & Insights: Memecoin Market Duopoly

Pump Fighting Back

• The Solana memecoin launchpad landscape has evolved into a competitive duopoly between incumbent pump.fun and challenger LetsBonk, with market share dynamics shifting significantly in recent months. 
  • Looking at graduated tokens, we can focus on a subset of meaningful activity as opposed to pure token launches, which include more noise. 
• Pump.fun maintained a dominant position with approximately 80% market share for graduated tokens throughout 2025, establishing itself as the go-to platform for memecoin launches on Solana. 
  • However, LetsBonk mounted a significant challenge in early July, rapidly capturing market share to peak at nearly 70% of graduated tokens, demonstrating the fluid nature of user preferences in the competitive launchpad space.
  • Platform incentives such as airdrops have also been a large driver of volume as users speculate on airdrops and rewards. 
• The platforms differentiate through distinct approaches to token graduation and fee structures. 
  • Pump.fun operates with a traditional ~$69k market cap bonding curve threshold and charges 0.05-0.1 SOL to create tokens plus 1-2% trading fees, while LetsBonk offers instant listing across automated market makers like Raydium and Jupiter with a 1% swap fee structure. 
• The competitive dynamics have seen pump.fun respond to LetsBonk's challenge, reclaiming approximately 75% market share by the most recent data after losing significant ground in July. 
  • Despite the intense competition for market share, overall launchpad activity remains robust with approximately $120 million in daily trading volumes as tokens continue to launch across platforms.

Is a Parabola Convex or Concave?

• Aave has been one of the charts that have gone parabolic, with total value locked surging from $8 billion at the start of 2024 to $47 billion currently, demonstrating the protocol's expanding role as DeFi's lending infrastructure backbone. 
  • This exponential growth trajectory positions Aave as a clear indicator that decentralized lending has achieved meaningful product-market fit within the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem.
• The lending sector's success reflects fundamental advantages that DeFi protocols offer over traditional financial avenues. 
  • Permissionless access eliminates credit checks, geographical restrictions, and lengthy approval processes, allowing users worldwide to access capital markets 24/7 without intermediary gatekeepers. 
  • Transparent smart contract execution provides visibility into lending terms, interest rate calculations, and protocol mechanics, contrasting with opaque traditional banking operations. 
  • Additionally, the ability to earn yield on deposited assets while maintaining liquidity through tokenized deposits creates a dynamic where users can simultaneously lend, borrow against their collateral, and deploy capital across multiple DeFi strategies.
• Aave's dominance is particularly notable given its command of approximately 80% of outstanding debt on Ethereum, while simultaneously growing its unique borrower base to over a thousand users who are actively utilizing the platform's borrowing capabilities.
• The protocol's growth coincides with broader institutional adoption of DeFi lending, as the sector matures from experimental technology to functional financial infrastructure. 
  • This trend suggests that decentralized lending may increasingly serve as a bridge between traditional finance and cryptocurrency markets, offering familiar lending concepts with enhanced transparency and global accessibility.

Hat-ETH Rally

• Monthly trading volume of CME Ethereum futures recorded its highest ever figure in history, with over $118 billion worth of volume in July, a significant 82% MoM increase.
  • Alongside volume, open interest in CME ETH futures also experienced a 75% MoM increase, from $2.97 billion in June to a record $5.21 billion in July as CME traders’ appetite for ETH has gone crazy of late.
• This ETH mania is not isolated to CME either, as total monthly volume of ETH futures across all exchanges also reached a new all-time high of $2.12 trillion in July 2025.
  • This marks a 38% MoM increase, as well as being 13% higher than its previous all-time high of $1.87 trillion from over 4 years ago in May 2021.
    Aggregated OI of ETH futures is also hovering near record highs, standing at $36.3 billion as of Saturday, 9 August 2025.
  • With both trading volume and OI of ETH futures at record highs, the price of ETH itself rose past $4,300 on Saturday, its highest level since December 2021.
  • Yet despite this, aggregated funding rates of ETH is currently nowhere near the elevated levels seen in December 2024, the last time the price of ETH was anywhere close to this high.
  • An interesting sidenote, despite not even being halfway through the month yet, Google search volume for Ethereum is currently the highest it's been since June 2022.

Keep Betting

• Polymarket had over 286K active traders in July, its highest total since April, ending a six-month downtrend for this metric.
  • July’s total rose by over 18% month-over-month (MoM) increase, and is the first MoM increase since January, as this metric had been declining by an average rate of -12% per month since January.
  • Meanwhile, the number of new markets on Polymarket experienced a notable surge in July, with over 11.5K markets representing a 44% MoM increase.
  • Yet unlike the number of active traders, the number of new markets on the platform has consistently increased every month since Polymarket’s inception, reflecting expansion and diversification beyond the platform’s early politics-heavy focus.
  • On the other hand, trading volume moved the other way, declining -8.6% MoM to about $1.06 billion.
  • That implies an average trade size of $3.7K per user in July compared to $4.8K per user in June.
  • In short, the average user traded smaller in July even as the platform’s total users grew.

Good Deeds

• Weekly trading volume of the Bored Ape-affiliated NFT collection “Otherdeeds for Otherside” experienced a notable surge in the last week of July/first week of August, with over $907K worth.
  • This represents an 876% week-over-week (WoW) increase.
  • The spike was likely caused by billionaire Adam Weitsman buying over 5,000 Otherside NFTs (including Otherdeeds) directly from Yuga Labs and pledging additional open-market purchases.
  • A few days prior to that, a wallet paid 200 ETH for Otherdeed #67722, a plot with a 1-of-1 “artifact”.
  • Big-ticket outliers like this often attract a spike in expectations and yank liquidity toward the collection in the short-term.
• July also brought Otherside’s first “always-on” experiences called “Bathroom Blit”z and an upgraded “Clubhouse Bubbles” social hub
  • While these developments were not necessarily direct catalysts for the one-week volume spike, they might have refreshed the narrative for interested potential buyers and made whale activity feel like “smart money front-running utility.”