Written by: Pine Analytics
Compiled by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News
Raydium's third quarter opened with its weakest month since 2023 and closed with its highest-fee month in over a year. After stripping out wash trading, quarterly volume was $16.1 billion, up 17% quarter-over-quarter, with 62% concentrated in September. Fees more than tripled to $57.1 million. RAY rose from $0.63 to $1.91, a quarterly gain of 204%; SOL rose 59% over the same period.
The turnaround had two causes, and they occurred in sequence. In August, the team released a series of LaunchLab upgrades that let external platforms run their own launchpads on Raydium, with their own fees, rules, and quote assets. On September 5, StonkFun, a launchpad that pairs new tokens with tokenized stocks, migrated all its issuance to LaunchLab. LaunchLab issuances jumped from 5,420 in August to 156,294 in September; StonkFun's tokens generated $2.81 billion in trading, accounting for 28% of Raydium's volume that month.
The question is whether this level can be sustained in Q4. The last time a single partner drove LaunchLab was LetsBonk in July 2025, and LaunchLab fees fell 79% the following month. In the first four days of October, average daily fees were 43% lower than in September.
July was the low point. Volume fell to $2.34 billion and fees to $3.38 million, the lowest fee month since October 2023. On the 1st of that month, Robinhood Chain went live; The Defiant reported that over the following two weeks pump.fun's share of launchpad fees fell from about 80% to 27%. On July 8, Raydium said it would not leave to build elsewhere.
August recovered to $3.71 billion as tokenized stock trading rebounded and StonkFun began creating concentrated liquidity pools directly on Raydium. September then reached $10 billion, peaking at $684 million on September 21.
CLMM still handled 63% of quarterly volume but fell 14% quarter-over-quarter. Growth came from the two programs fed by the launchpad. CPMM and LaunchLab together traded $3.25 billion in September, more than three times the sum of the previous five months. Across the four programs, 40% of Q3 volume occurred in pools that did not exist on June 30.
The figures above exclude $7.01 billion in wash trading, equal to 30% of Raydium's on-chain recorded volume for the quarter. Once isolated, the pattern is clear: it involves about 1,600 CLMM pools with few token holders. In the pools we examined, one wallet bought about $9,000 of tokens and sold them back within 20 seconds, several times a day. Buy and sell matching in these pools was within 1%, accounting for 0.5% of Raydium swaps. The same pattern generated $5.1 billion in Q2, so it does not explain this quarter's growth, but any raw Raydium volume includes it. After exclusion, our total is within 2% of DefiLlama's $15.8 billion.
The data also adds $1.97 billion that is recorded on-chain but has no dollar value: swaps between two assets with no price feed, mainly launch tokens quoted in tokenized stocks. We valued them at the quote asset's price on the day. Nearly all of it occurred in September.
According to DefiLlama data, Raydium's share of Solana DEX volume rose from 7.1% in Q2 to 7.9% in Q3. The monthly trajectory is steeper: 4.3% in July and 12.2% in September, when it ranked third, behind PumpSwap at 18.6% and BisonFi at 12.3%.
The growth was not accidental. Raydium released 14 program upgrades during the quarter, 5 of them concentrated between August 17 and 31 to land LaunchLab. These upgrades turned a fixed-template launchpad into a partner-configurable platform. Platforms can now quote in Token-2022 assets, the standard adopted for tokenized stocks; the fee cap was raised from 100 basis points at creation to 500 basis points; the platform receives a share of post-graduation token liquidity fees; it collects transfer fee revenue from token creation onward; and it can set 19 curve parameters. StonkFun migrated five days after the final version was released, with its tokens quoted in stocks and reward tokens carrying a 1% to 3% transfer tax.
Other programs also moved toward the same kind of customer. CLMM added regulated-issuer controls: whitelisted operators can open multiple pools per trading pair, and LP positions in restricted securities are frozen but manageable. CPMM lets creator fees be collected by anyone on the creator's behalf, and a version released on September 19 lets the protocol retain a portion of fees. The remaining upgrades were maintenance: AMM v4 dropped its dormant OpenBook dependency, and the four programs migrated to Anchor 1.0.
StonkFun's STONK token began trading on July 23, and the platform was built on CLMM in August. On September 5, it announced that all new deployments would go through LaunchLab. Raydium said the next day that LaunchLab now supports any token pair and called StonkFun its first integration partner.
The effect was immediate. On September 4-5, LaunchLab recorded 119 issuances; on September 6 it reached 5,098; afterward it averaged 6,214 a day, peaking at 12,261 on September 21. StonkFun accounted for 149,085 of September's 156,294 issuances. Pump.fun still issued 1 million tokens that month, so among the launchpads we track, LaunchLab's issuance share rose from 0.4% in August to 12%.
Volume followed the tokens. StonkFun's bonding curve traded $921 million in September. 3,473 tokens graduated into CPMM pools, which in turn traded $1.89 billion. Together that is $2.81 billion, not yet counting the CLMM pools StonkFun created in August. LaunchLab's overall graduation rate was 2.4%, versus 3.4% for pump.fun.
The migration also changed how tokenized stocks are used on Raydium. Trading pairs with a tokenized stock leg traded $4.14 billion in Q3, a quarter of all volume and more than double Q2's $1.77 billion. Stocks traded directly against SOL or stablecoins accounted for $2.43 billion, up 40%, and September's $1.66 billion was the highest month since data began in March 2026. The new part is launch tokens quoted in stocks, which traded $1.71 billion versus just $30 million in Q2. Raydium said on August 19 that cumulative tokenized stock volume had exceeded $4 billion, and Backpack Securities listed another 20 stocks on September 10.
DefiLlama recorded $57.1 million in Q3 trading fees, versus $17 million in Q2. September alone reached $44.6 million, the highest month since July 2025. Fees grew faster than volume because launch tokens trade at higher fee tiers: fees were 0.13% of volume in Q2 and 0.47% in September.Raydium retains 16% of CLMM and CPMM fees, of which 12% is used for RAY buybacks and 4% for the treasury; it retains 12% of AMM v4 fees. On this split, protocol revenue was $9.39 million, versus $2.61 million in Q2; buyback allocation was $6.20 million. LaunchLab charges a 25 basis point protocol fee on curve trades, about $2.40 million in September versus $38,800 in August.
Buybacks are visible on-chain. The Raydium buyback wallet received 4.58 million RAY in Q3, worth $5.15 million at daily prices, three times Q2's $1.72 million. July $360,000, August $850,000, September $3.94 million. This is 83% of the allocation implied by the fee split; the difference is untracked. The largest single day was September 8 at $651,000.
RAY did nothing for two months, then tripled. The quarter opened at $0.63, touched $0.60 on July 1, and was still $0.77 on August 31. It doubled in the week after the StonkFun migration, from $0.82 on September 5 to $1.67 on September 12. It peaked at $2.17 on September 28 and closed the quarter at $1.91, up 204%. Market cap rose from $169 million to $516 million, and RAY gained 91% against SOL.
September buybacks annualize to $47 million, 9% of quarter-end market cap; July annualized to $4.3 million. Q3 buybacks of 4.58 million RAY were 1.7% of circulating supply. Raydium said on August 31 that more than 30% of circulating RAY had been bought back. The Q2 token holder report showed the treasury at $97.1 million and 37.3 million RAY staked, 13.7% of circulating supply; Q3 has not been updated. No buyback policy or staking change was announced during the quarter, and no security incidents were found.
Liquidity did not grow with activity. TVL rose from $859 million to $1.34 billion, up 56%, matching SOL's 59% price gain. Denominated in SOL, TVL fell 2%.
The base rate for a single partner driving a LaunchLab surge is poor. LetsBonk pushed LaunchLab fees to $9.42 million in July 2025. A month later they fell to $1.97 million, and the month after to $550,000, declines of 79% and 94%. Raydium's total fees fell 54% in the first month. In September 2026, LaunchLab fees were $9.81 million, the same size and with the same concentration: one partner accounted for 95% of launches.
October opened closer to that path. Two of the first four days were weekends, and launches averaged 3,789 a day, 39% below the post-migration September average. Fees averaged $860,000 a day versus $1.49 million in September, about $26 million annualized. If LetsBonk's subsequent 54% decline repeats, October fees will be close to $20 million.
Raydium has taken steps to retain more of the remaining fees. The CPMM upgrade recorded in September went live on October 1, and each CPMM fee tier now sends 5% of the creator fee to the protocol. StonkFun graduation pools traded $1.89 billion on CPMM in September. How much revenue this adds depends on the creator fee rates of those pools, which has not been measured.
Data sources and methodology
Trading volume, pools, launches, partners, and buyback data come from our own Solana transaction index. Wash trading exclusion rule: a pool's same-day buy and sell volume match within 1%, average swaps are at least $1,000, and the pair is not SOL, a stablecoin, or a staked token on both sides. The rule captures one pattern; other wash trading may remain. Swaps without a USD value are valued at the same-day price of the quote asset; 25 million swaps in Q3 were valued this way, and 0.5% remain unvalued. Tokenized stocks are identified by issuer naming, and the list is approximate. Buybacks are RAY received by the buyback wallet, valued at daily prices; the same method gives $1.72 million for Q2, consistent with Raydium's Q2 token holder report. Fees, protocol revenue, market share, and TVL come from DefiLlama. Prices come from CoinGecko daily values. Program changes come from the Raydium documentation changelog; the October 1 CPMM deployment and the 5% rate were read on-chain. Company statements come from Raydium, StonkFun, Robinhood, and Backpack announcements. pump.fun fee share comes from The Defiant.