Raydium Reaches 11-Month High With Three Catalysts Driving the 90% Rally

Raydium (RAY) price surged to an 11-month high on Friday. This move was part of a 90% weekly rally, making it the second-strongest performer among the top 300 cryptocurrencies.

The Solana decentralized exchange (DEX) token gained ground while the wider crypto market slipped 3.9% over the same seven days, with Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and XRP (XRP) all trading lower.

RAY Token Outruns a Falling Market

RAY ranks 117th by market capitalization and has added 14.67% in the past 24 hours alone. It touched an intra-day high of touched $1.75 today. 

This marked its highest price since late October 2025. Only STONK (STONK) meme coin, up 1,220.8% this week, posted a bigger weekly gain across the top 300.

Most Solana ecosystem tokens followed the market lower this week, leaving RAY as the outlier.

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3 Catalysts Behind the 90% Move

According to CoinGecko, 3 catalysts sit behind the latest rally. StonkFun said on September 6 that all new token deployments would run through Raydium’s LaunchLab. 

The switch cut deployment costs to 0.03 SOL from 0.29 SOL. Raydium also upgraded LaunchLab this month.

Raydium then repurchased $640,788 of RAY on September 9. Messari data shows that it was the heaviest daily buyback since February 2025. The protocol routes 12% of fees towards RAY purchases.

Raydium buybacks recorded their highest level since February 2025.solana:4k3Dyjzvzp8eMZWUXbBCjEvwSkkk59S5iCNLY3QrkX6R pic.twitter.com/fHzjMlVe2s

— Messari by Blockworks (@MessariCrypto) September 9, 2026

Tokenized equities supplied the third stream. Backpack Securities listed Grindr’s GRND token on September 10, and it saw $11 million in trading volume in an hour.

More than 15 stock tokens, including Boeing, Costco, and Roblox, also went live through Backpack and Sunrise this week.

Buybacks scale with fee revenue, and fee revenue scales with volume. The open question is whether StonkFun’s launch flow and stock-token trading hold up once the speculative burst around them cools.

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