Raydium, a decentralized exchange built on Solana, and its native token $RAY have been experiencing parabolic growth over the past week. At the time of writing, $RAY is up roughly 27% in the last 24 hours and 105% over seven days. The token is trading at $1.72, a level not seen since last November. Its market capitalization now stands at $465 million, putting it on the cusp of entering the top 100 cryptocurrencies. The catalyst for this bullish momentum is not any new product release from Raydium itself.
Source: CoinGecko
StonkFun Redirected Every New Launch to LaunchLab
StonkFun is a token launch platform on Solana with a unique pairing structure. Typically, such platforms pair new tokens with SOL or USDC, whereas here the platform offers pairs with tokenized stocks, pre-IPO tokens, ETFs, fiat currencies, and other crypto assets.
Some StonkFun tokens launch in a reward mode, which imposes a 1% or 3% tax on every transaction of that coin. The funds collected this way are redistributed to holders proportionally based on the amount of the coin they own. The uniqueness lies in the form in which they receive payouts. Holders receive payouts not in the coin itself, but in the currency it was paired with. For example, a token paired with tokenized Apple stock would receive a payout in that stock.
This is the reflection meta-model in practice. The total value of rewards distributed on StonkFun currently exceeds $32 million, of which roughly $4.9 million worth of ZEC went to holders of ZCAT.
Source: StonkFun
On September 5th, StonkFun moved all new launches onto Raydium's LaunchLab platform. This means all trades are now settled via Raydium pools, and every participant pays a fee to Raydium.
The key here is the sales volume driving this shift. Over the past seven days, StonkFun has generated $5.88 million in fees, ranking second among all launch platforms. The leader is Pons with $10.46 million. pump.fun, which dominated this category for two years, is in third place with $4.73 million.
Source: DefiLlama
Twelve Percent of Every Dollar Paid in Fees Goes to Buy $RAY
Raydium takes 12% of all trading fees and uses that money to buy $RAY on the open market. This is not a promise to buy at some point. The purchases happen daily at whatever the prevailing price is.
Imagine a buyer who shows up every day with a fixed budget and no target price. The size of that budget depends on the trading volume that passed through Raydium pools the previous day. More launches mean more trades. More trades mean more fees. And more fees mean the buyer's wallet gets bigger.
The second half is what happens to the $RAY afterwards. It is placed into the protocol's treasury wallet, not sent back to exchanges. Every token purchased is a token that can't be sold at the next day's price.
Buyback Volume Reached $640,788 on September 8th
Source: Blockworks
On September 8th, the protocol spent $640,788 to buy $RAY in a single day, marking the largest daily buyback since February 2025.
For most of 2026, daily buybacks remained flat and barely noticeable on the chart. They increased in August. The first week of September sharply altered this trend. The LaunchLab platform itself is now ranked ninth among launchpads with a seven-day fee volume of $886,612.
