Decoding the ’Launchpad Wars’: Who’s Winning the Crypto Incubator Arms Race?

The battle for blockchain's next big thing just got fiercer. Launchpads—those springboards for new crypto projects—are now locked in a high-stakes showdown. Forget meme coins; this is where the real infrastructure wars are raging.

Subheader: The Metrics That Matter (And The Ones That Don't)

Total value locked? Team pedigrees? Tokenomics? Every platform claims superiority, but the numbers reveal a messier truth. Some launchpads thrive on exclusivity, others on volume—nobody's cracked the perfect formula yet.

Subheader: VCs Circle as Retail Gets Squeezed

Watch the smart money: venture capitalists now treat top-tier launchpads like private equity playgrounds. Meanwhile, your average degens fight for table scraps in public sales. Some things never change—even in 'decentralized' finance.

Closing Thought: In a sector obsessed with disruption, launchpads ironically mimic Wall Street's worst habits. The more crypto evolves, the more it resembles what it sought to destroy. (But hey, at least the grift comes with better UX.)

In terms of graduation rates, 151 tokens graduated from Pump, while JUP Studio and Letsbonk graduated 64 and 51, respectively.

Now, do these numbers matter? Depends on who you’re asking.

For PUMP investors, it’s probably meaningless. Not only are they backwards-looking across a mere 24 hours, there’s little hope that these numbers sustain beyond a day or a week.

But Sebastian L., the founder of Mesa (a marketing agency for token launchpads) told me otherwise.

Degen traders in the memecoin “trenches” are eyeing graduation rates as a relevant signal of where the next winning memecoin is. The idea is that if Launchpad A is graduating 100 tokens daily while Launchpad B is graduating 10, then you’d probably want to put your chips on a token coming from A.

It’s not a strong moat, but it’s something. This temporary moat is what Theia’s Felipe Montealegre refers to as Pump’s “Schelling Point fairy dust.”

The wheels of fortune can spin in favor of Pump today, but they can spin in favor of another launchpad next week.

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