How pump.fun works

pump.fun is a launchpad. Anyone can create a token in a minute: pick a name, a ticker, an image, and pay a small fee. There is no presale and no team allocation built in. Every token starts the same way, on a bonding curve.

The bonding curve

When a coin launches, there is no liquidity pool yet. Instead, pump.fun itself sells you tokens from a fixed supply of 1 billion. The price follows a formula: every buy makes the next token a little more expensive, every sell makes it a little cheaper.

That means:

• The first buyers get the lowest price. This is why bots and the dev's own wallets race to buy in the first block.
• You can always sell back into the curve while the coin is on it. There is no pool to drain, so a classic "pull liquidity" rug is not possible at this stage.
• The price can still go to almost nothing if everyone who bought sells.

Bonding (graduation)

Around 800 million of the 1 billion tokens can be bought on the curve. When they are all sold, the coin bonds: the SOL collected on the curve and the remaining tokens are moved into a real liquidity pool, and trading continues there. Read Bonding and migration for what changes after that.

Most coins never bond. The large majority of launches stall at a few thousand dollars of market cap and are abandoned within hours.

Who earns what

• pump.fun takes a fee on every trade.
• The creator earns a share of trading fees on their coin. This is the "creator fee" that projects like Trenchive use to pay contributors.
• Traders earn or lose the difference between where they bought and where they sold.

What to look at on a fresh launch

1. Who created it. Click the dev wallet. Has it launched 40 coins this week? That is a serial launcher.
2. The first block. How much supply did the first few wallets take? See Bundles.
3. Socials. A real X account with history beats a link to a profile created an hour ago.
4. Bonding progress. A coin at 90% of the curve behaves very differently from one at 5%.