Raydium Rises to 11-Month High After Buybacks and LaunchLab
The Solana DEX is benefiting from LaunchLab changes, fee buybacks, and more trading in tokenized equities. That has helped RAY stand out even as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP are weaker.
Key Takeaways
- Raydium hit an 11-month high on Friday after a 90% weekly rally, while the broader crypto market fell 3.9%.
- Three drivers were LaunchLab changes, a $640,788 buyback on September 9, and extra volume from tokenized equities.
- The protocol uses 12% of fees to buy RAY on the open market, and the price touched about $1.75 today.
Raydium reached an 11-month high on Friday after a 90% weekly rally. That made the Solana DEX token one of the biggest gainers in the top 300, while the broader crypto market fell 3.9% over the same period. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP also moved lower that week.
RAY Stands Out
The RAY token ranks 117th by market cap and rose 14.67% over the past 24 hours. The price touched about $1.75 (€1.51) today, its highest level since late October 2025. Only the STONK memecoin did better this week, with a gain of 1,220.8%.
What stands out is that many tokens in the Solana ecosystem moved with the weaker market. RAY clearly broke away from that trend and drew extra attention across the altcoin market.
Three Drivers Behind the Rally
According to CoinGecko, three factors were behind the recent move higher. StonkFun said on September 6 that all new token deployments would go through Raydium’s LaunchLab. At the same time, deployment costs dropped from 0.29 SOL to 0.03 SOL. Raydium also made further changes to LaunchLab this month.
A second boost came from the buyback program. Raydium bought back $640,788 (€551,600) worth of RAY on September 9. According to Messari, that was the biggest day for buybacks since February 2025. The protocol uses 12% of fees to buy RAY on the open market.
Tokenized Equities Add Extra Volume
The third factor was trading in tokenized equities. Backpack Securities launched the GRND token from Grindr on September 10, generating $11 million (€9.5 million) in trading volume in one hour. This week, more than 15 stock tokens also went live through Backpack and Sunrise, including those from Boeing, Costco, and Roblox.
For European crypto followers, this matters because Raydium shows how quickly liquidity inside a DeFi platform can shift when launch tools, fee buybacks, and new trading flows all pick up at once. The big question now is whether that higher activity in LaunchLab and tokenized equities will hold up once the speculative spike cools off.
The broader Solana DeFi market is also benefiting from those shifts; Jupiter recently expanded its lending product on Solana with extra yield features, showing that activity across the ecosystem is picking up on multiple fronts.
