Flaunch - No Fee Pump.Fun Alternative? What You Need to Know
Fair Launch, State of Token Launches, & More
Crypto is seeing a lot of regulatory changes right now, and virtually all are positive, even if prices might not be doing too well. Just today, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick claimed Trump would reveal a “$BTC Reserve Strategy” during Friday’s White House Crypto Summit.
Beyond $BTC, the SEC has been on a roll lately, halting or outright dismissing seemingly all of the significant ongoing crypto lawsuits. Importantly, a statement was issued essentially declaring a free-for-all for memecoins; they are not securities, and enforcement action will not be taken upon matters involving them. These actions beg the question: can the current methods of token issuance in crypto change?
Crypto has seen all sorts of ways to launch new tokens; from ICOs to IDOs, with significant additions to these token primitives like Binance Launchpool, and now, Pump.Fun. As evidenced by the rise of memecoins in 2024, it’s clear that participants want something much closer to fully-diluted, fearing unlocks even perhaps to the point of paranoia. For the longest time, U.S. regulations made teams skeptical and extremely cautious when it came time to launch their tokens.
With a regulatory environment for friendly toward these launches, things could be changing, and ensuring optimal practices for token launches could be important for market sustainability. In today’s edition, we’ll discuss Flaunch (as in ‘fair launch’), a new approach to token launch and trading mechanisms…
Stay informed in the markets ⬇
Background on Flaunch
Flaunch operates by the motto ‘devs get revs’, taking a pro-creator approach. Fees have always been a source of contention within crypto; whether it be NFTs or memecoins, when protocols see a lot of revenues, some communities look for ways to direct some of this toward themselves or just creators in general.
To date, Pump.Fun has extracted ~$590M worth of $SOL fees, much of which has been sent to exchanges and likely sold. Flaunch is the counter to this, creating a launchpad where token deployers are paid the fees for swaps, with additional automated buybacks implemented as an attempt to keep tokens afloat and overcome periods where immense sell pressure presents itself.
Furthermore, the rights to these fees can be sold off, available to mint as an NFT. This tokenization of fees is flexible, creators can even fractionalize their NFTs if they wish. It’s somewhat rich to assume that there might be a market for this kind of thing, but the fact that this exists within the protocol reflects the team’s ‘think outside the box’ approach to incentives design.
Besides incentives, the other issue Flaunch tackles is obviously the launch of tokens themselves; there is a period during the initial creation of the token where the price is fixed, before open trading is enabled. This can help to remove the problem of snipers, or at least mitigate their role in the immediate early stages of token launch.
Like Pump.Fun, Flaunch has a very stimulating UI, enticing users to both trade and launch tokens. To date over $600K in fees have been routed to token deployers even during this market downturn, a significant amount though obviously very small compared to what Pump.Fun brings in.
Behind the unique mechanics and ideas made available with Flaunch is its use of Uniswap V4 hooks. For some background, hooks are customizable functions that can be added to a pool in order to modify its behavior. With hooks, developers can customize and augment the capabilities of the concentrated liquidity model. This makes it possible to create new pools with specified hooks that can execute before or after particular pool actions.
Pools on Uniswap have lifecycles with events occurring at different times. These include pool creation, when liquidity is added, removed, or readjusted, and users swap tokens. Hooks enable “plugins” that will perform a designated action at key points throughout the pool’s lifecycle.
The obvious main drawback with Flaunch is that the project is deployed on Base, not yet available on Solana. This is both good for Base and perhaps the Ethereum/EVM ecosystem at large, and bad for the protocol. It’s perhaps not fair to hold choice of chain against a protocol; many teams might be mission-driven or choose a particular chain for certain reasons. But in the token launch and memecoin space, Solana is where the action is, and where any potential disruption can be felt the most.
Some of the Base trading volumes seem to have been supported by the AI agents meta, especially involving Virtuals toward year-end, 2024. Virtuals deploying on Solana, combined with just the significant decline in interest and activity as a whole within the AI agents sector, serve as headwinds for Base activity relative to its peak. Not to mention, $TRUMP, $MELANIA, and even $LIBRA served to swing the pendulum of highly-speculative activity in Solana’s favor.
Still, Flaunch provides an interesting alternative to the current status quo in the memecoin and permissionless token launch space. While volumes might not be extremely high right now, conceptually, Flaunch can still have some outsized influence in how teams go about launching their native tokens and the kinds of considerations they make.
Important Links
Become a Premium member to unlock all our research & reports including access to our members-only discord server.
Join thousands of sharp crypto investors & traders by becoming a Premium Member & gain an edge in the markets. For just $129/month, you can access our full suite of offerings:
Gain instant access to Deep Dives, Blueprints, and Perspectives.
Priority access to new features and exclusive content.
Ideal for investors who demand comprehensive insights.
Full access to historical research archive and analytics tools.