RAY's ~100% Week Wasn't the 90% Memecoin Crown — Tokenized Stocks and a Fee-Fed Buyback Carried It

RAY, the token of Solana's biggest decentralized exchange, roughly doubled in a single week while most of crypto fell. The explanation circulating for the move is that Raydium commands 90% of Solana's memecoin trading volume. That headline deserves to be pulled apart before you decide whether it means anything — because the number is narrower than it sounds, it is being chipped at from below, and neither of those things is what actually moved the price.

What the "90%" really measures

The figure comes from Cointelegraph, and it is not wrong so much as specific: it is 90%-plus of memecoin trading volume on Solana, a slice of a market, not Solana trading as a whole. The same coverage includes an update that quietly changes the picture — Raydium's share of total Solana DEX volume has slipped to roughly 37%, losing ground to Orca and to PumpSwap, the exchange created by the launchpad pump.fun that handles much of the new-coin churn. Across all decentralized exchanges everywhere, Raydium has taken only about 8% of the last three years of volume.

The two numbers can both be true because they measure different denominators. Memecoins are a narrow category, and it is a category Raydium no longer owns outright. So the pillar the headline rests on is the shakiest part of the story — the part that is already eroding rather than the part that is surging.

The move was carried by equities and a buyback

Decompose the rally itself and the driver is not memecoins at all. Through the week Raydium hit an 11-month high near $1.75, and the specific catalysts named for it were a string of tokenized U.S. stocks arriving on the exchange. Backpack Securities listed a tokenized Grindr on Raydium that traded about $11 million of volume within its first hour, and Boeing, Costco, and Roblox were among more than a dozen stock tokens that went live that week. In the same stretch, the launchpad tool StonkFun began routing every new token deployment through Raydium's LaunchLab, cutting project launch costs roughly tenfold.

There is also a mechanical reason a wave of volume lifts RAY specifically. Raydium is a toll booth: it earns fees on everything that trades through it, and it directs 12% of those fees into buying RAY back from the market. In early September that buyback reached a record single-day size of roughly $640,000, the heaviest in real terms since February 2025. Volume becomes fees, fees become buybacks, buybacks withdraw supply — so RAY is, in effect, a leveraged claim on the amount of money flowing through the exchange, which is why a surge in trading activity lands directly on the token rather than just on the platform's revenue line.

The contrast with the rest of the market matters here. This was not a rising tide: the broader crypto market slipped roughly 4% over the same stretch while RAY ripped higher. One token outperforming while its entire sector drifts down points to capital being pulled into a specific, idiosyncratic story — not a broad re-rating of everything Solana touches. That is exactly the pattern you want to look at twice, because it means the move can reverse as fast as the story cools.

Why the equity angle is the durable part

The reason this week is more than a meme pump is that tokenized equities represent a genuinely different fee base than memecoins. A meme coin is a speculative churn that can disappear overnight; a tokenized blue-chip stock is a recurring trading instrument backed by a real company's shares. If Raydium becomes the venue where that asset class concentrates, the exchange earns fees on a larger, steadier pool of volume than the one the "90% memecoin" stat describes.

Two complications keep this from being a clean buy-the-tollbooth story. First, there is still regulatory uncertainty over whether tokenized stock tokens carrying actual shareholder rights can trade legally through decentralized venues like this one; a reported five-year regulatory exemption covering such trading, per a CoinMarketCap AI news summary, is the newest and least-settled piece of the setup, and the whole category remains subject to how regulators treat it. Second, the buyback is not free money — it is a redistribution of the exchange's own revenue, and it scales with volume, so it provides no floor once the volume leaves. The largest chunk of the record buyback was funded by the same speculative burst that is now the subject of the price.

The number to watch

Strip the headline and what is left is a specific, falsifiable claim: RAY's value tracks the fees Raydium collects, and the interesting question is no longer its memecoin share but how the fee base splits as stock tokens trade at real scale over the coming months. If tokenized-equities volume persists after launch-week excitement fades and keeps feeding the buyback, the ~100% week was a re-rating of the exchange's fee pool. If the Grindr-style volume was a launch spike and the memecoin crown keeps slipping to PumpSwap and Orca, then the token has run well ahead of the revenue that the market was pricing.

Either way, the title's two numbers — the 90% memecoin share and the roughly 100% surge — are only loosely connected. The dominance claim is the contested, shrinking part of the story; the rally was carried by something else entirely. Knowing which one you are actually paying for is the whole trade.