Raydium Doubles in a Week as StonkFun Volume Floods Its Fee Engine

Raydium, the decentralized exchange built on Solana, and its native token RAY is seeing parabolic growth over the past week. At the time of writing, RAY is up around 27% over the past 24 hours and 105% over seven days. The token is trading at $1.72, a price level not seen since November last year. Its market cap now sits at $465 million and it’s on the brink of breaking into the top 100 cryptocurrencies. The catalyst for this bullish momentum did not come from anything Raydium shipped. 

Source: CoinGecko 

StonkFun Routed Every New Launch to LaunchLab 

StonkFun is a token launchpad on Solana with a unique pairing structure. The usual pairing in a launchpad are new tokens against SOL or USDC, whereas over here, the platform pairs against tokenized stocks, pre-IPO tokens, ETFs, currencies and other crypto assets. 

Some StonkFun coins launch in reward mode, which puts a 1% or 3% tax on every transfer of that coin. The money collected here is redistributed to the holders, split by how much each person holds. The unique bit here is what they get paid in. These holders do not get paid in the coin itself but rather whatever the coin was paired against. For example, a token that’s paired against tokenized apple stock gets this payout. 

That is the reflection meta in practice. The total amount of rewards distributed on StonkFun now stands at over $32 million with around $4.9 million in ZEC to holders of ZCAT. 

Source: StonkFun

On September 5, StonkFun moved all new launches onto Raydium’s LaunchLab. This means every trade now settles through Raydium’s pools and everyone pays Raydium a fee. 

The volume behind that switch is the part that matters. StonkFun has generated $5.88 million in revenue over the past seven days, second among all launchpads. Pons leads with $10.46 million. pump.fun, which has defined this category for two years, sits third at $4.73 million.

Source: DefiLlama

Twelve Percent of Every Fee Dollar Goes Into Buying RAY

Raydium takes 12% of all trading fees it collects and spends that money buying RAY on the open market. Not a pledge to buy at some point. Purchases that happen daily, at whatever the price is.

Think of it as a buyer who shows up every day with a fixed budget and no price target. The size of that budget depends on how much trading went through Raydium’s pools the day before. More launches bring more trades. More trades bring more fees. More fees hand that buyer a bigger wallet.

The second half is what happens to the RAY afterward. It goes into a protocol wallet rather than back onto exchanges. Every token bought is a token that can no longer be sold into the next day’s bid.

Buybacks Hit $640,788 on September 8

Source: Blockworks

On September 8, the protocol spent $640,788 buying RAY in a single day, the largest daily buyback since February 2025.

For most of 2026, daily buybacks sat in a flat band and barely registered on the chart. They picked up in August. The first week of September turned that slope vertical. LaunchLab itself now ranks ninth among launchpads with $886,612 in seven day fees.

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