How to create a memecoin on Solana

Two routes. Use a launchpad — pump.fun, Bags, or an app built on Meteora's Dynamic Bonding Curve — and you fill in a form, sign one transaction, and the token trades in minutes for no creation fee. Or mint an SPL token directly, revoke its authorities, and pair it into a DEX pool yourself. The second gives you control; the first gives you an audience.

The steps that separate a credible launch from a dead contract are the same on both routes, and almost every competing guide skips them.

Route one: launching on a Solana launchpad

The venues worth knowing about as of 31 August 2026:

pump.fun is the default by an enormous margin — 85.9% of Solana token issuance on 8 February 2026 (Jupiter data), roughly 42,000 launches in 24 hours as of 10 June 2026, and up to 83% of all Solana minting on peak days that month. Creation costs 0 SOL, trading is charged at 1.25% total split between creator and protocol, and graduation to PumpSwap costs roughly 0.015 SOL when the curve fills. What is pump.fun covers the mechanism.

Bags is the genuine number two, and it competes on creator economics rather than volume: creators earn 1% of every trade, and fees are splittable across up to 100 creators, apps or wallets — which makes it the natural venue for a launch with multiple collaborators. It now runs on Solana and Robinhood Chain, with Solana around 91% of its fees. It does not publish a creation fee; read the cost on the confirmation screen. What is Bags has the detail.

Meteora's Dynamic Bonding Curve held 6.65% of Solana issuance on 8 February 2026, second only to pump.fun, and almost nobody names it — because it is infrastructure other apps build on rather than a consumer destination. If you launch through an app that uses it, the fees and parameters are set by that app, not by Meteora. What is Meteora's Dynamic Bonding Curve explains why it never appears in listicles.

The steps:

1. Fund a Solana wallet. Phantom, Solflare and Backpack all work. You need SOL for network fees and for any initial buy of your own token.

2. Decide your own first buy before you open the form. Most curve venues let the creator take the first position. This is the most consequential number in the flow and it is easier to settle before a countdown is running.

3. Open the venue's create page and read the fee estimate on the confirmation screen. Do not budget from a published table, including this one.

4. Fill in name, ticker, description, image and socials. Check whether an established token already uses your ticker — you inherit its confusion and its scam reports. Attach a real community channel: in a study of 832,941 Solana mints between 8 May and 10 June 2026, launches advertising a Telegram graduated at 1.485% against 0.166% without, an 8.94× differential.

5. Set the initial market cap above the platform default if the venue allows it. That was the strongest single predictor of graduation in the same study. It also means committing your own SOL, which is exactly why it predicts anything.

6. Sign. The token exists and trades.

On this route the platform has already handled mint authority, freeze authority and the liquidity structure for you. Skip to the credibility checks below to confirm what it actually did.

Route two: minting an SPL token directly

More steps, more control, no audience.

1. Create the mint account. This sets decimals and supply and records who holds mint and freeze authority. Six or nine decimals are both conventional; the choice affects nothing economic.

2. Attach metadata. Name, symbol and a URI pointing at your image and description, stored in a Metaplex metadata account. Without it, wallets and explorers show your token as an unnamed address.

3. Mint the full supply to your wallet. Total supply is a cosmetic decision — 1 billion and 1 trillion produce identical market caps at different per-token prices. What matters is distribution, not the headline number.

4. Revoke mint authority. Until you do, you can create unlimited additional supply at any time, and every scanner will say so.

5. Revoke freeze authority. Until you do, you can freeze any holder's token account, which is the mechanism behind a large class of honeypots.

6. Create the liquidity pool. Pair your token against SOL or USDC on Raydium, Meteora or another Solana DEX. You receive LP tokens representing your share of the pool.

7. Lock or burn the LP tokens. Until you do, the entire pool is withdrawable by you.

8. Run your own token through RugCheck before you tell anyone it exists. Whatever it flags, a buyer will ask about.

The cost breakdown for this route — rent deposits, base fees at 5,000 lamports per signature, priority fees — is covered properly in how much it costs to create a Solana token, including why quoting a single SOL figure is the wrong shape of answer.

The steps everyone skips, and why buyers check them

This is where a Solana launch is actually won or lost, and it is the section missing from most guides ranking for this query.

Mint authority

Mint authority is the right to create more of your token. If it is still held by any address, the supply you advertised is not the supply — it is the supply so far. Every Solana safety scanner checks this field automatically, and RugCheck surfaces it on the first screen of a token report.

Revoking it is a single transaction and irreversible. The irreversibility is the point: an unrevoked authority is a promise, and a revoked one is a fact recorded on-chain. Mint authority and freeze authority on Solana, explained covers exactly what each field controls.

Freeze authority

Freeze authority lets whoever holds it freeze individual token accounts, which means a specific holder can be prevented from selling while everyone else trades normally. It is the cleanest mechanism for a targeted honeypot, and buyers treat an unrevoked freeze authority as a hard stop rather than a yellow flag.

The order matters in practice: revoke freeze authority and mint authority before you create the pool, not after. A launch that goes live with both live and revokes them an hour later has already been screenshotted. How to revoke mint and freeze authority covers the exact sequence.

Locking or burning liquidity

On a launchpad this is handled for you — pump.fun migrates the whole position atomically to PumpSwap when the curve fills, in a single transaction with no window in which the token exists without a market. On a direct mint, nothing happens unless you make it happen.

Burning LP tokens sends them to an address nobody controls, making the liquidity permanently irremovable. Locking places them in a time-locked contract that returns them to you at a set date. Burning is stronger and irreversible; locking preserves your ability to migrate the pool later and is what most projects with any intended lifespan choose. LP burning vs LP locking: which is actually safer works through the trade-off, and how to lock liquidity covers the mechanics.

Say plainly what neither does: a locked or burned pool does not stop you selling your own token allocation. That is a separate risk, it is visible in holder distribution, and pretending otherwise is the most common piece of dishonesty in this category.

Supply distribution

The last check, and the one no transaction can fix afterwards. Buyers run holder distribution before they buy, and clustered supply across many addresses is detectable even when no single wallet looks large. If your launch is bundled — multiple wallets buying in the same block from a common funder — that pattern is legible to anyone who looks. How to read a token's holder distribution is the check that will be run on you.

Which route suits which launch

If the token is a memecoin in the ordinary sense — an attention asset whose fate is decided in its first hours — the launch feed is the product and the launchpad route is almost always correct. If you need supply control, a custom pool, or a lock on terms you set, mint directly and accept that distribution is entirely your problem.

What this guide does not tell you

It does not tell you a token that passes all these checks is safe to buy or worth launching. Since January 2024, pump.fun has hosted 11.9 million launches. Eighteen tokens have ever exceeded a $10M market cap and 96 have exceeded $1M (10 June 2026). Not currently — ever. Revoked authorities and locked liquidity move you from "obviously disqualifying" to "not disqualified", which is a much smaller improvement than it sounds.

It does not give you current fee or rent figures. Read them from the transaction you are signing.

It does not cover the legal position, which is not trivial: pump.fun itself faces multiple US class actions alleging the sale of unregistered securities, and promotional conduct rather than deployment is where enforcement has landed. Is it legal to launch a memecoin in the US covers where things stand.

Before deploying, the token launch checklist is the short version, how to create a memecoin covers the cross-chain picture, and current per-venue launch and graduation figures sit in the Meme Central analytics hub.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to revoke mint authority on a launchpad token?

No — pump.fun, Bags and the other hosted venues handle the mint configuration themselves, and the token arrives with authorities already disposed of. Verify rather than assume: paste the mint address into RugCheck and read the authority fields. If a venue leaves either authority live, that is something you want to know before you promote the token.

Should I burn or lock my liquidity on Solana?

Burn if you never intend to move the pool: it is permanent and irreversible, and buyers read it as the stronger commitment. Lock if you may need to migrate liquidity to another DEX or restructure later. A lock has a term and an expiry date, so publish both — a lock expiring in a week reads very differently from one expiring in a year.

How much supply should I keep as the creator?

There is no safe answer, only a visible one. Deployer holdings and wallet clusters are the first thing buyer-side tools flag, and splitting an allocation across addresses does not hide it — bundled and sybil patterns are exactly what cluster visualisation exists to detect. Whatever you hold, assume it is found and discussed publicly.

Can I create a memecoin on Solana without coding?

Yes. pump.fun and Bags are web forms end to end, and no-code deployers handle a direct SPL mint including metadata and authority revocation. Coding matters for verifying what was deployed rather than writing it. Avoid custom contract behaviour: non-standard logic is what buyer-side scanners flag, and it works against you rather than for you.

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If your launch does not have to be on Solana

Everything in the direct-mint route here is a separate transaction with a gap between each one, and buyers can see the gaps. MintPlus — built by TrustSwap, which also builds Meme Central — mints a fixed-supply token with liquidity locked through Team Finance at the moment of creation, closing that window. The limitation is a real one for this article: MintPlus supports Ethereum, Robinhood Chain, Polygon, Base and BNB, not Solana. For an SPL token you are choosing between a Solana launchpad and the manual sequence above.

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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.