State of the launchpads: the monthly report

As of 31 August 2026, DefiLlama tracks 245 launchpad protocols holding roughly $240.4M in aggregate TVL. The top five by seven-day fees are Pons at $16.13M, pump.fun at $14.3M, Flap.sh at $2.68M, Bags at $1.51M and o1 Launchpad at $739K. Four venues take about 90% of the visible fee market.

This page is rebuilt at the start of each month. What follows is the 31 August 2026 baseline, the method used to produce it, and an explicit statement of what the numbers do and do not cover.

The league table, 31 August 2026

Figures above are DefiLlama's, read on 31 August 2026. Two smaller venues sit outside the fee table but inside the story: Four.meme on BNB Chain (30d fees $388,324, TVL $4.39M, rank #7 among launchpads by TVL) and Clanker on Base (30d fees $234,041, rank #156 of 245).

Treat any single-day figure in this category as soft. DefiLlama's 24-hour number for Bags printed $4,390 against a seven-day average near $214K a day on 31 August — almost certainly indexing lag rather than a real collapse. Seven- and thirty-day windows are the ones worth quoting.

The concentration fact

Add the trading terminals to the launchpads and the combined seven-day fee run-rate across verifiable names comes to roughly $52M a week, about $2.7B annualised (31 August 2026). Of that, pump.fun, Pons, Axiom and fomo account for roughly $47M. Four venues, about 90% of the entire visible market.

That is the single most useful number on this page, and it has a specific shape. Two of the four are issuance venues and two are trading terminals, which means the fee pool is split across the launch side and the trade side rather than concentrated in one layer. Axiom ran $12.23M in seven-day fees against $7.19M revenue; fomo ran $4.34M against $3.61M. The revenue-capture gap between them — roughly 60% versus 90% — is the clearest signal in the terminal data, because it says fomo took the volume lead without buying it back in rebates. That comparison is worked through in the trading terminal rankings.

The concentration also explains why a 245-protocol count is misleading on its own. The long tail is real in the sense that the contracts exist; it is not real in the sense of carrying volume. LetsBonk, which held roughly 54% of Solana launch share in July 2025, reported monthly revenue of $84,910 and 24-hour fees of $380.76 on its own dashboard in August 2026. Heaven reported $0 in fees across 24h, 7d and 30d, after a quarterly trend of $4.48M in Q3 2025 down to zero in Q3 2026. Both are technically live. Neither is commercially alive. Dead and dying memecoin launchpads covers what killed each of them.

What a fee ranking structurally misses

A league table ordered by fees answers "who is extracting the most", not "where are tokens being launched". Those diverge, and August 2026 contains the clearest example the category has produced.

Pools.trade, launched by Uniswap Labs on 5 August 2026, charges no launchpad fee at all. Its economics are a 0.25% LP fee that autocompounds into permanently locked liquidity, with an optional 0.05% creator slice carved out of that 25 basis points. Within days it held roughly 50% of Robinhood Chain launchpad volume and about 40% of new tokens on the chain. It does not appear in a fee league table in anything like that proportion, because the model is designed not to take a fee. Read the table alone and you will conclude Pools.trade is marginal. Read launch counts and you will conclude the opposite. What Pools.trade actually does sets out the mechanism.

The same caution applies in reverse to Pons. Its $16.13M in seven-day fees is higher than pump.fun's, which is a genuinely surprising fact about where activity sits in 2026, but only $2.84M of that is protocol revenue. The rest flows to creators under a 70/30 split on a 1% pool fee. Ranking by fees puts Pons first; ranking by revenue does not. Neither ranking is wrong, and an article that quotes one without naming which it used is. How launchpad fee splits actually work explains why the two numbers come apart, and what Pons.family is covers its no-bonding-curve, no-migration design.

Meme Central's own index: scope, and what it is not

Everything above is third-party aggregate data, cited with its source and date. The blocks below are Meme Central's own, and they carry a different and narrower claim.

Meme Central indexes token launches across the venues it has integrated. That index is a sample. It is not the whole market, it does not claim to be, and no figure derived from it should be read as a market total. Every response from the public API carries the coverage envelope that states this:

{
  "scope": "tokens indexed by Meme Central",
  "not_total_market": true,
  "data_since": "<per-venue index start date, returned with every response>",
  "venue": "pump-fun",
  "window": "7d"
}

The data_since field matters more than it looks. Coverage of a venue begins when Meme Central integrated it, not when the venue launched, so a per-venue series is only comparable to itself after that date. Comparing two venues with different data_since values over a window that predates one of them produces a difference that is an artefact of coverage rather than of the market. The API returns the field so you can catch that; the analytics hub shows it on every venue page, and the public data API documents the full schema.

How this report is built

Third-party figures are read on the last day of the month and quoted with the reading date attached, never re-dated on republication. Where a source publishes both a fee and a revenue figure we quote both, because the gap between them is usually the interesting part. Where a venue publishes nothing — Bags' creation fee, hood.fun's fee schedule, nad.fun's trading fee — the entry says "not published" rather than carrying a plausible-looking estimate.

Meme Central's own figures come from its launch index and are labelled as an indexed sample everywhere they appear, including in exported CSVs and API responses. We do not publish an all-chain daily launch total, because no source aggregates one credibly. pump.fun alone was running around 42,000 launches in 24 hours as of 10 June 2026 and up to 83% of Solana minting on peak days, and Robinhood Chain recorded 42,709 tokens created in a single day on 17 July 2026, but adding numbers from sources with different counting rules produces a total that means nothing.

Venue-level detail sits in the analytics hub, and the live cross-chain launch feed with per-venue filters is on the Meme Central feed.

What this report does not tell you

It does not tell you which venue is best. A fee ranking measures extraction, a volume ranking measures activity, a launch-count ranking measures issuance, and the three have disagreed all year. The side-by-side of mechanisms rather than league positions is in memecoin launchpads compared.

It does not tell you that any of this persists. Robinhood Chain went through three launchpad regimes in nine weeks between July and August 2026 — Noxa's monopoly, then Pons, then Pools.trade — and Noxa went from roughly 75% of chain deployments to a dark website in under two weeks. Monthly snapshots of a market that reorganises this fast are useful as a record, not as a forecast.

It does not cover venues that no aggregator indexes. Telegram-native tools in particular are poorly covered by DefiLlama, so their absence from fee tables is evidence of measurement gaps as much as of decline. We present that as an inference and would rather say so than launder it into a fact.

And it does not give a market-wide graduation rate, because the published figures range from 0.198% to 1.4% for reasons that are mostly definitional. Memecoin graduation rates by launchpad sets out why, and what a defensible range looks like.

Frequently asked questions

Which memecoin launchpad has the largest market share in 2026?

It depends what you measure. By seven-day fees on 31 August 2026, Pons led at $16.13M ahead of pump.fun's $14.3M. By protocol revenue, pump.fun leads comfortably, because Pons passes most of its take to creators. By Solana issuance share, pump.fun held 85.9% as of 8 February 2026. Name the metric or the answer is meaningless.

How many memecoin launchpads are there?

DefiLlama tracked 245 launchpad protocols as of 31 August 2026, with roughly $240.4M in aggregate TVL. That count includes a very long tail of venues with negligible or zero activity — Heaven reported $0 in fees across every window that month. A count of protocols is not a count of functioning markets.

Is Meme Central's data the whole market?

No. Meme Central publishes figures from tokens it has indexed, and every API response carries a coverage envelope stating not_total_market: true alongside a data_since date per venue. Third-party aggregate figures on this page are labelled with their source and reading date. The two are kept visibly separate for exactly this reason.

How often is this report updated?

Monthly, at the start of each month, using figures read on the final day of the previous one. Reading dates stay attached to figures on republication rather than being refreshed to the publication date, so an unchanged number is visibly unchanged rather than falsely current.

Why do fee rankings and volume rankings disagree?

Because some venues charge nothing. Pools.trade took roughly 50% of Robinhood Chain launchpad volume within days of its 5 August 2026 launch on a zero-launch-fee model, so it barely registers in a fee table. A venue can be the busiest place to launch and near-invisible in the revenue data at the same time.

---

Lock the liquidity before the data has anything to say about you

Every number on this page is downstream of one decision a launcher makes on day one: whether the pool can be pulled. Team Finance — built by TrustSwap, which also builds Meme Central — locks LP tokens for a fixed term on Ethereum, Robinhood Chain, Polygon, Base and BNB, and the lock shows as a verified badge on the token's page in our feed. It does not stop a creator selling their own allocation, it does not improve the odds this report describes, and a locked pool with concentrated supply is still a token to walk away from.

---

Nothing here is financial, legal or tax advice. Memecoins are extremely high-risk: most lose most of their value, and the majority of tokens launched never reach a decentralised exchange at all. Never spend money you cannot afford to lose entirely. Meme Central does not recommend any specific token. Data described as Meme Central's own reflects tokens indexed by Meme Central and is not whole-market data.