How much it costs to launch a token on every chain
The Editor·10 min read·Updated 31 Aug 2026
Token launch cost by chain, dated 31 August 2026: creation fees, gas, liquidity and lock costs per venue — and why liquidity is the only line that matters.
As of 31 August 2026, creating a token costs between nothing and a few dollars on every chain that matters. pump.fun charges 0 SOL, Pools.trade charges no launch fee, Pons charges 0.0005 ETH, Four.meme costs around 0.005 BNB. Gas is cents-scale on every L2. Liquidity is the only line item with real money in it.
This is a dated comparison table, refreshed quarterly. Every figure carries its reading date, and where a venue publishes nothing the cell says so.
The table
| Chain | Venue | Creation fee | Gas token and shape | Minimum liquidity the venue requires | Lock cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solana | pump.fun | 0 SOL | SOL; 5,000 lamports per signature plus priority fee plus refundable rent | None — the curve seeds from buyers | Not applicable; LP migrates to PumpSwap at ~0.015 SOL |
| Solana | Bags | Not published | SOL; same base structure | None | Not published |
| Solana | Meteora DBC | Set by the app built on top of it | SOL | Set by the integrator | Set by the integrator |
| Robinhood Chain | Pons.family | 0.0005 ETH | ETH; L2 execution fee plus L1 data fee, cents-scale | None — pool is live from block one | Creator rewards accrue in the token's locked position |
| Robinhood Chain | Pools.trade | Zero | ETH; same structure | Crowd Launch: $10K minimum FDV or contributors are refunded. Instant Launch: none | Included — liquidity is permanently locked and creator-unremovable |
| Robinhood Chain | hood.fun | Not published | ETH | Not published | Included — auto-migrates to a locked Uniswap v3 pool |
| Base | Clanker | No stated creation fee | ETH; L2, cents-scale | None — deploys direct to a Uniswap v4 pool | Not included; takes a fixed 20% of the creator LP fee |
| BNB Chain | Four.meme | ~0.005 BNB | BNB | None | Not applicable; migrates to PancakeSwap |
| Monad | nad.fun | Not published | MON | ~225,000 MON collected and ~80% of supply sold to graduate | Not published |
| Ethereum L1 | Direct deploy | None to any venue | ETH; L1 gas, orders of magnitude above every L2 | Whatever you pair into the pool | A locking service fee plus L1 gas |
All venue fees read on 31 August 2026. The cells reading "not published" are the most honest part of the table: Bags does not publish a creation fee, hood.fun does not publish a fee schedule, and nad.fun's documentation states its graduation threshold but not its creation fee, trading fee or migration target. Pages quoting precise numbers for those are guessing. Open the venue's creation form, connect a wallet, and read the cost the transaction simulation shows before you sign. That figure is current; no table is.
Arc
Reviewed 1 Sep 2026 — pre-mainnet, Arc mainnet 16 Sep 2026.
| Chain | Venue | Creation fee | Gas token and shape | Minimum liquidity the venue requires | Lock cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arc | No launchpad live pre-mainnet | Not applicable | USDC, 18 decimals; EIP-1559-style base fee, so costs are dollar-denominated | Not published | Not published |
Arc is the one chain in this comparison where gas is not a volatile asset: fees are paid in USDC, so what you spend deploying a contract and seeding a pool is quoted in dollars from the start. Predictable is not the same as cheap, and none of the venues naming Arc had published a fee schedule as of 1 Sep 2026. The current landscape is in our comparison of the launchpads emerging on Arc.
Why there is no gas column in dollars
Because a dollar gas figure is wrong before the page is indexed, and printing one would make this table worse rather than more useful.
What you can know is the structure. On Solana you pay 5,000 lamports per signature — 0.000005 SOL — plus a priority fee you choose to compete for block space, plus refundable rent deposits sized to the bytes each account occupies. Rent is a deposit, not a fee, and it returns if the account is closed. A mint account, a metadata account and every holder's associated token account each carry their own.
On EVM chains you pay gas in the chain's gas token. Robinhood Chain and Base are both L2s using ETH, so a deployment bundles an L2 execution fee with an L1 data fee and lands cents-scale. BNB Chain prices gas in BNB and sits in a comparable range. Ethereum L1 does not, and that gap is the whole reason memecoin issuance never happened there.
Robinhood Chain publishes no swap or deployment cost figures at all. One inference is available and it is an inference, not a fact: chain fees of $1.07M across roughly 3 million transactions in 24 hours (31 August 2026) imply an average near $0.30 to $0.36 per transaction, dragged upwards by deployments and complex swaps, which puts a simple transfer plausibly well under $0.10. Separately, since 9 July 2026 Robinhood has covered gas above $5 on swaps made in Robinhood Wallet on Robinhood Chain — a standing policy, wallet swaps only.
Liquidity is the actual budget
Run down the creation-fee column and the spread between cheapest and dearest is a fraction of a cent. Run down the liquidity column and there is no ceiling. If you are optimising a launch budget you are optimising liquidity; the creation fee is noise.
On a bonding-curve venue you can start with nothing, because the curve seeds itself from buyers. That is a real option and it is what most launches take. It is also why a study of 832,941 Solana mints between 8 May and 10 June 2026 found that an initial market cap set above the platform default was the strongest single predictor of graduation it identified (hazard ratio 4.51). Setting it above default means committing your own capital first.
On a direct-deploy route you are the liquidity provider and the pool is exactly as deep as you make it. There is no minimum, and no floor to how badly a thin pool behaves: a very shallow pool moves double digits on a small buy, which makes the chart unreadable and the token untradeable at size. You hold the other side of every trade, so that capital is at risk in both directions. How memecoin liquidity pools actually work covers the mechanics.
One venue has removed the decision. Pools.trade's Crowd Launch runs a four-hour window with TWAP bidding designed to defeat bundling, and refunds contributors if the launch does not reach a $10,000 minimum fully diluted valuation. That is a different risk shape from a bonding curve, not a cheaper one.
Lock costs, and where they are already paid
A liquidity lock is a fixed-term commitment that the LP tokens cannot be withdrawn. Where you deploy directly, it costs a fee to the locking service plus gas; read the current fee on the service's own page rather than trusting a figure in any article, including this one.
Three venues include it. Pools.trade pools are permanently locked and creator-unremovable by design; hood.fun auto-migrates into a locked Uniswap v3 pool; Pons keeps creator rewards accruing inside the token's locked position. On pump.fun, Four.meme, Clanker and any direct deploy, nothing is locked unless you lock it. How to lock liquidity — and why buyers check covers the process.
A lock does not stop you selling your own allocation, and it does not make a token with most of its supply in three wallets safe.
What this comparison leaves out
It leaves out marketing, which is unbounded and unquotable. The only defensible datum is from that same 832,941-mint study: launches advertising a Telegram graduated at 1.485% against 0.166% for those that did not, an 8.94× differential. That is not evidence a Telegram link causes anything, only that launches where somebody did work look different in the data.
It leaves out tax — creator fee income is income when received in most jurisdictions, whether or not you convert it — and it leaves out Arc, where the honest answer is not a number at all. Can you launch a memecoin on Arc sets out what has and has not been confirmed.
And it does not tell you which chain to choose. That is a distribution question, not a cost question. Per-venue launch and graduation data sits in the analytics hub, the raw series is available through the public data API with its coverage envelope attached, and the live cross-chain launch feed shows where issuance is happening today — all of it a sample of tokens Meme Central indexes, labelled as such in every response, never whole-market data.
The longer prose treatment, including the agency-quote problem, is in how much it costs to launch a memecoin. If cost is genuinely your binding constraint, cheapest chains to launch a token on compares the first two columns directly, and the monthly venue picture is in the state of the launchpads report.
Frequently asked questions
What is the cheapest chain to launch a token on in 2026?
By creation fee, several tie at zero: pump.fun charges 0 SOL and Pools.trade charges no launch fee, as of 31 August 2026. By total cost including gas, every major L2 and Solana land in the same cents-scale band, and the differences between them are smaller than the priority fee you choose. Ethereum L1 is the only genuine outlier upwards.
Why does this table say "not published" instead of giving a number?
Because Bags, hood.fun and nad.fun do not publish those fees anywhere reachable. Filling the cell with a plausible estimate would be inventing a figure someone might budget against. The reliable method is to open the venue's creation flow, connect a wallet and read the cost shown in the transaction simulation before signing.
How much liquidity do I actually need?
No venue in the table requires any, except Pools.trade's Crowd Launch mode, which refunds contributors below a $10,000 minimum FDV. What a launch needs and what a venue requires are different questions. A pool too thin to absorb an ordinary buy without double-digit price movement is functionally untradeable regardless of what the venue permits.
Does a cheaper launch mean a worse outcome?
Not directly, but the correlation runs that way. pump.fun's 0 SOL creation fee is why 11.9 million tokens have launched there since January 2024, and why only 18 had ever exceeded a $10M market cap as of 10 June 2026. Free creation produces free-creation outcomes. The cost that predicts anything is the liquidity you commit, not the fee you pay.
If fixed supply with the lock already in place is what you want
The table shows how little the creation line costs and how much sits in the liquidity and lock lines. MintPlus — built by TrustSwap, which also builds Meme Central — mints a fixed-supply token with liquidity locked through Team Finance at creation, on Ethereum, Robinhood Chain, Polygon, Base and BNB, so there is no window in which the pool is unlocked. It is our own product: it does not seed your liquidity, it does not give you the free distribution a bonding-curve feed provides, and a locked pool with concentrated supply is still a token buyers should refuse.
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.
