- RAY doubled in a week to its highest price since October 2025.
- StonkFun routed all new token launches through Raydium’s LaunchLab.
- Raydium ran its largest single-day buyback of RAY to date, worth $640,788.
- Grindr’s tokenized stock and more than 15 US equities now trade against Raydium liquidity.Â
Raydium’s RAY token doubled over seven days and touched an intraday high near $1.75 on September 11, a level it last traded at in October 2025. The move came almost entirely from activity around the protocol rather than anything Raydium itself shipped. StonkFun, a Solana launchpad that pairs new tokens against tokenized stocks, switched all of its deployments to Raydium’s LaunchLab in early September, and the fee volume that followed fed directly into an automated buyback that reached its heaviest level in more than a year. RAY closed the week up roughly 105%, second only to the STONK meme coin across the top 300 assets, at a time when Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP all traded lower.
The change that started the rally was a plumbing decision. On September 5, StonkFun moved every new token launch onto Raydium’s LaunchLab, which means each trade now settles through Raydium’s pools and pays a Raydium fee. StonkFun works differently from a standard launchpad: instead of pairing new tokens against SOL or USDC, it pairs them against tokenized stocks, pre-IPO tokens, ETFs and currencies. Raydium had upgraded LaunchLab days earlier to allow any supported quote token as a pairing, and StonkFun became the first platform to use that model. Deployment costs fell to 0.03 SOL from 0.29 SOL, a roughly 90% cut, which lowered the barrier to launching a token to almost nothing.
The revenue this produced is the part that moved the price. StonkFun booked $5.88 million in fees over seven days, placing it second among all launchpads and ahead of pump.fun, the platform that has defined the category for two years.
Because StonkFun’s launches now run on top of LaunchLab, that $5.88 million of StonkFun activity converts into fee flow for Raydium’s own engine, which is where the second catalyst begins.
A $640,788 daily buyback, up from almost nothing for most of 2026
Raydium routes 12% of every fee dollar it collects into open-market RAY purchases. This is not a scheduled pledge to buy at a set date. It behaves more like a daily buyer that shows up with a budget tied to the previous day’s trading volume and no price target. When StonkFun’s volume flooded the fee engine, that budget expanded fast. On September 9, the buyback reached $640,788 in a single day, the largest to date and the heaviest since February 2025. Total buybacks across the program now stand at $2.1 million. For most of 2026, daily buybacks sat in a flat band that barely registered on a chart, then climbed through August and inflected sharply in the first week of September.
A buyback of this kind removes tokens from circulation, which can support the price as long as demand holds. The mechanism only stays strong while launchpad volume stays high, and that dependency cuts both ways.
Grindr’s token pulled $11 million in its first hour on Raydium
Raydium sits at the meeting point of two of Solana’s most active narratives right now: memecoins and tokenized real-world assets. The protocol listed more than 15 tokenized versions of US equities, including Boeing, Costco, Reddit, Lululemon and Roblox, tradable around the clock through Backpack Securities and Sunrise Protocol. Grindr’s GRND token, which listed on September 10, drew $11 million in trading volume within its first hour. Pump.fun added a “Custom Pairs” feature that lets memecoin projects trade directly against these tokenized stocks and other assets, which pulls even more of that flow toward Raydium’s pools.
RAY broke its August ceiling and holds above both moving averages
RAY broke out of an August consolidation band that had held between roughly $0.75 and $0.85, then ran vertically once the catalysts landed. On the 4-hour Binance chart, price trades near $1.63, above both the 20-period and 50-period moving averages. Those two averages track the short-term and medium-term trend; with the 20-period line at $1.3431 and the 50-period at $1.1391 and both sloping up, the uptrend is intact rather than exhausted. The nearest Fibonacci retracement level from the recent swing sits at $1.5546. The level worth watching on any pullback is the $1.29 area, where the 0.5 retracement overlaps with prior price memory, and analysts flagged $1.2910 as support during the run.
On-chain usage climbed to record levels alongside the price
The rally shows up in usage as well as price. Staked SOL on Raydium hit an all-time high of 470,817 tokens, active wallets reached 162,085, and daily transactions climbed to 3.1 million, both monthly peaks. Santiment counted 1,074 addresses making their first RAY transfer in a single day, and holder totals moved above 204,000. Daily protocol revenue reached about $440,000, its highest since July 2025.
Zero-cost launches are the risk hiding inside the rally
The same structure that produced the rally introduces its main risk. At 0.03 SOL per launch, the cost of creating a token is close to zero, which invites a flood of low-quality launches that can dilute attention and spread liquidity thin across too many pairs. Raydium’s revenue and buyback budget both track launchpad volume, so a slowdown in speculative activity would shrink the buyback just as quickly as it grew. The protocol signaled more listings are coming with a short “new pairs incoming” post, and its market cap now sits within reach of the top 100. The first of those pairs landed within the hour: Wendy’s stock, listed as $WEN, went live on Raydium through the same Backpack Securities and Sunrise setup behind the other tokenized equities. Whether RAY holds these levels depends less on any single announcement and more on whether StonkFun’s volume, and the tokenized-stock flow behind it, proves durable rather than a one-week spike.