How launchpad fee splits actually work
The Editor·7 min read·Updated 31 Aug 2026
A launchpad fee split decides who keeps each basis point: protocol, creator, liquidity or buyback. The real 2026 numbers for pump.fun, Pons and Pools.trade.
A launchpad fee split decides where each basis point of a trading fee goes: to the protocol, to the token's creator, into the liquidity pool, or into buying back the platform's own token. The headline percentage tells you what you pay. The split tells you who is paid, and the two answers are often very different.
Fees and revenue are not the same number
The most useful distinction in this subject is between fees and revenue as those words are used in protocol data. Fees are everything charged to users. Revenue is what the protocol keeps after pass-throughs. The gap between them is the split, expressed as a number.
Pons is the clearest illustration available. In the seven days to 31 August 2026 it collected $16.13M in fees — more than pump.fun's $14.3M over the same week — but booked only $2.84M in revenue. Roughly 82% of what Pons charged passed straight through to the people who launched tokens on it. Read the fee number alone and Pons looks like the largest launchpad in the market; read both and it is a distribution machine sitting on a large fee base.
Compare Four.meme on BNB Chain, where 30-day fees of $388,324 sat against 30-day revenue of $385,064 — essentially total capture. Or Flap.sh, where seven-day fees and revenue were both $2.68M. Same category, opposite business model.
| Venue | What the user pays | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| pump.fun | 1.25% total trading fee; 0 SOL creation | Split between creator and protocol; protocol share funds PUMP buybacks |
| Pons | 1% pool trading fee; 0.0005 ETH launch fee | 70% creator / 30% protocol |
| Pools.trade | 0% launch fee; 0.25% LP fee | ~80% autocompounds into locked liquidity, ~20% optional creator fee (0.05% of the 25bps) |
| Clanker | Creator LP fee charged per swap on Uniswap v4 | Fixed 20% to Clanker, 80% to creator |
| Bags | 1% of every trade to creators | Splittable across up to 100 creators, apps or wallets |
| Four.meme | ~0.005 BNB creation; 1% trading fee | Almost entirely retained by the protocol |
Figures verified 31 August 2026.
The four destinations
Every split in the table above routes money to some combination of four places, and each has a different implication for you.
Protocol. The operator's own take. It is the least interesting destination analytically, because it tells you nothing about the token you are trading.
Creator. The share paid to whoever deployed the token, and the lever most venues now compete on. Bags built its entire proposition on it: creators earn 1% of every trade and that entitlement can be split across up to 100 wallets, which is how it supports co-created tokens where several people share the upside. Pons pays 70% of a 1% fee. On pump.fun the 1.25% total fee is split between creator and protocol, though the exact ratio of that split is not published in the current documentation and we are not going to invent one — if you see a precise creator percentage for pump.fun quoted without a source, treat it as unverified. What creators actually earn across venues is covered in how memecoin creators actually make money.
Liquidity. The share that stays in the pool rather than being extracted. Pools.trade is the outlier here and the most structurally interesting design of 2026: it charges no launch fee at all, takes a 0.25% LP fee against a roughly 1% standard elsewhere, and autocompounds that fee into permanently locked liquidity the creator cannot remove. Roughly 80% of the take goes to liquidity, with an optional creator fee of 0.05% of the 25 basis points. From a buyer's perspective this is the only destination that improves the asset you are holding rather than paying someone for it.
Buyback. The share used to purchase the platform's own token. pump.fun's holders' revenue ran at an annualised $301.65M through PUMP buybacks as of 31 August 2026, and in its record week of 3–9 August 2026, $5.02M of buybacks burned roughly 2.15 billion PUMP. Of Pons's 30% protocol share, 80% is reported to go to PONS buybacks — a figure resting on a single low-quality source, so treat it as unconfirmed. Clanker has returned $5.62M cumulatively to holders this way, though the programme is paused.
Why the split matters to you specifically
If you are buying, only two parts of the split affect your outcome: the headline percentage you pay per trade, and the liquidity share that determines whether the pool gets deeper or shallower as volume accumulates. Everything else is a transfer between other people. A venue paying 70% to creators is not charging you less — it is charging the same and giving the money to someone other than itself.
If you are launching, the split is your revenue model, and it interacts with volume in a way the headline rate obscures. A 1% fee with a 70% creator share on a token that trades $10,000 pays you $70. A 0.25% fee with a small creator share on a token that trades meaningfully more pays you more, and leaves a deeper pool behind. The venues with the most generous creator terms are generally the ones competing hardest for deployments, which is information about the venue's position, not about your token's prospects.
Two structural notes are worth carrying. First, creator fees generally accrue and must be claimed — on Pons they build up inside the token's locked position and are claimable at any time. Unclaimed is not the same as unpaid, but it is also not the same as received. Second, in most jurisdictions creator fees are income when received, not capital gains, which is a materially different tax treatment from trading the token.
What this doesn't tell you
Fee splits are published by the venues themselves and indexed by third parties whose adapters vary in quality. The fees-versus-revenue distinction depends on how each protocol's adapter was written, so it is a strong signal rather than an audited statement.
Several numbers above are softer than they look. A meaningful share of 2026 launchpad coverage sits on SEO-farm domains, and Pons's fee mechanics rest on that kind of sourcing — the 70/30 creator split is well attested, the 80%-to-buybacks detail is not. Single-day figures lag: one protocol printed a 24-hour fee number two orders of magnitude below its own weekly average on 31 August 2026, almost certainly an indexing artefact.
Splits also change without notice. LetsBonk removed its flagship burn mechanism outright in December 2025. Read the fee shown in the interface at the moment you transact, not the one in an article. Venue-level fee and launch data is published on the Meme Central analytics hub, and per-app trading costs are broken out in what every major memecoin trading app charges.
Frequently asked questions
Who gets the fees on pump.fun?
pump.fun charges a total trading fee of 1.25%, split between the token's creator and the protocol, with creation free and graduation costing roughly 0.015 SOL. The protocol's share funds PUMP buybacks, running at an annualised $301.65M in holder revenue as of 31 August 2026. The precise creator-versus-protocol ratio is not stated in the current documentation. More detail sits in pump.fun's bonding curve, fees and graduation.
Why does Pons charge more in fees than pump.fun but earn less?
Because most of it is passed through. Pons took $16.13M in fees over the seven days to 31 August 2026 against $2.84M of revenue, the gap being its 70% creator share. pump.fun took $14.3M in fees and retained substantially more of it. The mechanism behind that structure is explained in Pons.family, the launchpad with no bonding curve.
Which launchpad has the lowest fees?
Of the major venues as of 31 August 2026, Pools.trade: no launch fee and a 0.25% LP fee against roughly 1% elsewhere. The more relevant point is where the fee goes — Pools.trade autocompounds it into permanently locked liquidity rather than paying it out, so the pool deepens as volume accumulates. Lowest cost and best structure happen to coincide there, which is unusual.
Do creator fees count as taxable income?
In most jurisdictions, yes, and as income at the point of receipt rather than as a capital gain. That is a different rate and a different reporting path from trading profits, and it applies whether or not you have claimed accrued fees into a spendable balance. Rules differ materially by jurisdiction; consult a qualified professional about your own facts.
If you are launching, fix the supply before you argue about basis points
Fee splits matter, but they are downstream of a decision buyers check first: whether the supply can change and whether the liquidity can be pulled. MintPlus — from Team Finance, built by TrustSwap, which also builds Meme Central — creates fixed-supply tokens with liquidity locked through Team Finance at creation, on Ethereum, Robinhood Chain, Polygon, Base and BNB. It is not a bonding-curve launchpad, so it does not come with a built-in creator fee stream or a trading venue; if a per-trade creator share is your revenue model, a curve-based venue is the right tool.
Nothing here is financial, legal or tax advice. Memecoins are extremely high-risk: most lose most of their value, and the majority of tokens launched never reach a decentralised exchange at all. Never spend money you cannot afford to lose entirely. Meme Central does not recommend any specific token. Data described as Meme Central's own reflects tokens indexed by Meme Central and is not whole-market data.
