Making sense of ‘launchpad wars’ data

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Everyone is a storyteller.

Founders, investors, marketers, builders, academics, writers — we all make sense of our chaotic world by turning observable data into digestible narratives.

Problems can and do arise, however, when vanity metrics become a stand-in for real authoritative insights.

Take Uber, for instance. In the company’s early years, topline vanity metrics like total trips or total active riders were “meaningless” and almost never mentioned in internal meetings.

“Instead, the discussion was always centered on the dynamics of each individual network, which could be nudged up or down independently of each other, with increased marketing budget, incentive spend for either drivers or riders, product improvements or on-the-ground operational efforts,” former Uber growth exec Andrew Chen writes in his bestseller The Cold Start Problem.

Topline metrics convey an illusion of success, but obscure the context needed to track actual growth.

Crypto, too, suffers from many such vanity metrics.

The most egregious example is probably “daily active addresses.” The metric says so little for two reasons.

One, the creation of new wallets is completely frictionless. Two, this industry presents overt monetary incentives to spin up new wallets and game airdrops.

What about memecoin launchpad metrics?

If you’ve paid any attention to Solana lately, you’re probably aware that the ecosystem’s premier launchpad, pump.fun, has been ceding market share to Letsbonk in recent weeks. 

The “launchpad wars” have commanded a fair bit of attention on Crypto Twitter — I guess because watching the decline of the consumer application single-handedly responsible for propelling Solana back into relevance post-FTX is intriguing.

But recently, Pump has made a bit of a comeback: 23.9k tokens launched on Pump yesterday, against 3,954 on Letsbonk.

In terms of graduation rates, 151 tokens graduated from Pump, while Jup Studio and Letsbonk graduated 64 and 51, respectively.

Now, do these numbers matter? Depends on who you’re asking.

For PUMP investors, it’s probably meaningless. Not only are they backwards-looking across a mere 24 hours, there’s little hope that these numbers sustain beyond a day or a week.

But Sebastian L., the founder of Mesa (a marketing agency for token launchpads) told me otherwise.

Degen traders in the memecoin “trenches” are eyeing graduation rates as a relevant signal of where the next winning memecoin is. The idea is that if Launchpad A is graduating 100 tokens daily while Launchpad B is graduating 10, then you’d probably want to put your chips on a token coming from A.

It’s not a strong moat, but it’s something. This temporary moat is what Theia’s Felipe Montealegre refers to as Pump’s “Schelling Point fairy dust.”

The wheels of fortune can spin in favor of Pump today, but they can spin in favor of another launchpad next week.

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