RAY Price Slides 23% While Raydium Pockets Its Best Fees in a Year

• RAY failed to reclaim its 200-period moving average on the 4-hour chart.
• Raydium’s quarterly trading fees more than tripled on launchpad and tokenized-stock activity.
• Buybacks absorbed a noticeable share of RAY’s circulating supply during the quarter.
• Early October data shows protocol activity cooling after an exceptionally strong September.

The RAY price is down 23.7% over the past seven days and sits around $1.82, even though Raydium, the Solana-based decentralized exchange behind the token, has just closed its strongest fee quarter in a year. Data compiled by Pine Analytics shows Raydium collected $57.1 million in trading fees in Q3 2026 and directed about $6.2 million of that into RAY buybacks, yet the token now sits below its EMA 200 on the 4-hour chart after a failed attempt to recover it on Oct 16. With a market capitalization of $489.7 million, RAY is caught between a fundamental story that improved sharply over the summer and a chart that still belongs to the sellers.

What Tripled Raydium’s Fees

The headline figure hides an unusual detail, since adjusted trading volume rose only 17% quarter-over-quarter to $16.1 billion, while fees more than tripled, which means Raydium earned far more on every dollar that passed through its pools. A rough calculation from the reported numbers puts the effective fee rate at about 0.35% of volume in Q3, compared with something below 0.14% in Q2, a shift that points to a different mix of traders and pools.

Two sources drove that mix, starting with tokenized-stock trading on Raydium, which reached $4.14 billion in the quarter, up from $1.77 billion in Q2, and LaunchLab, the protocol’s token-launch platform, went from 5,420 launches in August to 156,294 in September. Almost all of that September surge, roughly 95%, came through a single integration called StonkFun. Launch-driven trading of this kind tends to carry higher fees per trade than large-cap swaps, which would fit the gap between fee and volume growth, and the activity pushed Raydium’s share of Solana DEX volume from 4.3% in July to 12.2% in September.

Source: Pine Analytics

Why the Buyback Has Not Moved the Price

Raydium’s buyback wallet received about 4.58 million RAY during the quarter, worth $5.15 million at the time of receipt and equal to roughly 1.7% of circulating supply. Measured against today’s market cap, the $6.2 million allocation works out to about 1.3% of the token’s value per quarter, a steady source of demand that can soften sell-offs but is too small to set the direction on its own when traders are taking profit after a sharp rally. The program has a long track record, and Raydium said in August that cumulative repurchases had passed 30% of circulating supply.

The bigger issue is how concentrated Q3 was, with September alone producing $44.6 million in fees, about 78% of the quarterly total, so July and August together brought in only around $12.5 million. Raydium has seen this pattern before: when LetsBonk drove a LaunchLab boom in July 2025, LaunchLab fees fell 79% the following month. Pine Analytics found that activity in the first four days of October was already running below September’s pace, a short sample, but one that matches what the chart shows, with RAY breaking down from its $2.25-$2.55 range on Oct 12.

The liquidity data adds another caveat, because total value locked rose 56% to $1.34 billion in dollar terms, but fell 2% when measured in SOL, which suggests SOL’s own price rise accounts for most of the gain, with little fresh capital entering Raydium’s pools.

Sellers Defend the EMA 200

The Oct 7 spike came on the heaviest volume of the past month, and RAY held between roughly $2.25 and $2.55 for five days before sellers took over on Oct 12. The drop that followed cut through every Fibonacci retracement level of the rally and ended at $1.7371 on Oct 15, after RAY lost its EMA 200 on Oct 14, the average that had supported the uptrend since late September. That breakdown coincided with a broader sell-off, after a hotter-than-expected US inflation print pushed Bitcoin below $82,000 and a wave of liquidations hit altcoins.

Buyers tried to win that line back on Oct 16 and briefly lifted RAY to about $1.96, but the move stalled at the 0.236 retracement at $1.9344 and price fell back under the EMA 200, which now sits at $1.8949 and has stopped rising. The RSI reads 38.94, slightly above its signal line at 37.20, after dropping into oversold territory during the Oct 14-15 sell-off, so selling pressure has eased without buyers showing real conviction. Volume on the latest candles is among the lowest on the chart, and the SMA 50 at $2.1004 has turned lower.

The Triggers on Both Sides

A 4-hour close above $1.9344 would put the RAY price back over both the EMA 200 and the first retracement level, which would open a path toward the 0.382 level at $2.0564 and the SMA 50 near $2.10, the area where sellers are likely to return first. On the downside, the Oct 15 low at $1.7371 holds the current structure together, and losing it would expose $1.62 and the late-September lows below $1.60, where the rally behind the Oct 7 spike first picked up speed. Until one of those levels breaks, RAY is likely to keep trading between $1.74 and $1.94.

The next data point that could break that range sits outside the chart. On Oct 1, Raydium began keeping 5% of creator fees across its CPMM pools, the standard constant-product pools where most new tokens list, which gives the protocol a revenue line that grows directly with launch activity. October fee data will show whether that change, together with StonkFun and tokenized-stock flows, can hold revenue near September’s level, and that figure will also decide how much RAY the buyback wallet can absorb in Q4.