STONK, the native token of Solana-based launchpad StonkFun, surged more than 250% on Sunday after the platform announced it would move new deployments through Raydium's LaunchLab. The token traded near $0.16 at around 4:30 p.m. ET, with a market capitalization of roughly $140 million and about $135 million in 24-hour trading volume, according to CoinGecko data. Earlier in the day, STONK reached an all-time high of $0.212 before pulling back.
The rally followed a Saturday announcement that StonkFun would use Raydium's LaunchLab for new token launches. The integration promises cheaper deployment costs, reduced sniper risk, and compounding liquidity after bonding. LaunchLab operates on a bonding curve model: buyers and sellers initially trade against the curve, and once a token reaches its graduation threshold, liquidity migrates to a Raydium pool, where trading continues through Raydium and other aggregators. Raydium introduced LaunchLab in April 2025, shortly after Pump.fun launched its own decentralized exchange, PumpSwap.
StonkFun allows users to create tokens paired with tokenized stocks, ETFs, cryptocurrencies, currencies, and commodities. STONK itself is paired with SPYx, a token from Backed Finance designed to track the S&P 500 through the SPDR S&P 500 ETF. Because the token trades against SPYx, its dollar price reflects both SPYx's value and STONK's exchange rate against the tokenized ETF. This means STONK can fall even when the underlying ETF rises, and holding the token gives no claim on the underlying shares. StonkFun's stock pairings use products such as xStocks, which provide exposure to equities without ownership or shareholder voting rights. Kraken announced an agreement to acquire Backed Finance in December 2025.
Separately, a trader reportedly turned a $431,000 investment in STONK into more than $6.2 million in profit, underscoring the speculative appetite for new Solana-based launchpad tokens. The trade has drawn further attention to StonkFun and its token-buyback program, which uses a share of trading fees from v3 pools to buy and burn the platform's 10 largest tokens by market capitalization. Purchases are weighted by market cap and executed every few minutes. Currently, Zcash (ZEC), Hyperliquid (HYPE), and Bittensor (TAO) occupy the top three buyback slots, and 78 different tokens have been bought and burned through the program.
The Raydium integration also lifted related assets. Raydium's token RAY rose roughly 46% to about $1.27, while Jupiter's token JUP gained about 21% to $0.27. The update follows user complaints about sniping, single-wallet launches, and deployment costs. In a September 2 post, StonkFun said the changes would address those issues, and it temporarily increased maximum developer buys to discourage snipers. Solana's official X account amplified the momentum on Friday, replying to a StonkFun post: "We stand behind Stonk Tokens."
