What is pump.fun? Bonding curves, fees and graduation explained

pump.fun is a Solana token launchpad where anyone can deploy a memecoin for no SOL creation fee. The token trades immediately on a bonding curve — a constant-product AMM running on virtual reserves — and if enough is bought, the whole liquidity position migrates atomically to PumpSwap, pump.fun's own DEX. The total trading fee is 1.25%.

It is the largest venue in the category by almost every measure, and also the clearest demonstration of how rarely a memecoin launch works.

How the pump.fun bonding curve actually works

There is no liquidity provider at launch. Instead of a real pool, pump.fun tracks two virtual reserves — a notional SOL balance and a notional token supply — and prices trades against them using the standard constant-product formula. Buying moves the notional SOL balance up and the notional token supply down, so each subsequent buy costs more. Selling does the reverse.

The practical consequences matter more than the maths. Price is a pure function of net buying, so there is no order book, no spread and no way to place a limit. Every buyer along the curve pays a higher price than the buyer before them, which is why the earliest wallets in a launch have a structural advantage that has nothing to do with judgement. And because the curve is deterministic, bots can compute exactly what a buy will do to the price before submitting it — the mechanical basis for sniping and bundling.

If the curve concept is new to you, how launchpad pricing actually works covers the general model across venues before you get to pump.fun's specific implementation.

One thing we will not print: the exact virtual reserve constants and the current graduation threshold. Those are no longer published in pump.fun's official documentation, and the figures still circulating on comparison sites are copies of older docs. If you need the precise numbers, read the current contract or the interface quote rather than any article, including this one.

What pump.fun charges

The 1.25% figure is the number to hold on to, because it is the one most often misquoted. It is a total fee applied to trades on the curve, and it is split between the token's creator and the protocol rather than going entirely to pump.fun. That split is what makes launching attractive to creators who never expect a token to graduate — a curve that churns a few thousand dollars of volume still pays something. How launchpad fee splits actually work explains why that pass-through model changes creator behaviour across the whole category.

Note also that the 1.25% is not your total cost of trading. Priority fees, slippage on a thin curve and MEV extraction routinely cost more than the platform fee on small trades.

What graduation means on pump.fun

When the curve fills, the position migrates atomically and in full to PumpSwap. Atomically means it happens in a single transaction with no window in which the token exists without a market; in full means the accumulated liquidity moves rather than a portion of it. That is a genuinely better design than migration models that leave a gap or route only part of the pool, and it is worth saying so.

Reported graduation market cap sits in the $69K–$100K range. The variance in that figure across sources is itself informative: the threshold is denominated in SOL, so the dollar market cap at graduation moves with the SOL price.

After migration the token behaves like any other DEX pair — a real pool, real LPs, and price impact set by actual depth rather than a formula. What happens when a token migrates to a DEX covers the mechanics and the failure modes on the other side, and how to buy a token before it graduates covers the curve-side risks if you are trading pre-migration.

The scale numbers, and the one that matters

By 31 August 2026 pump.fun had accumulated $1.201B in cumulative fees and $95.766B in cumulative DEX volume. Over the preceding 30 days it took $45.81M in fees and $35.01M in revenue, on $2.534B of DEX volume. Holders' revenue runs at an annualised $301.65M through PUMP buybacks.

Its share of Solana issuance was 85.9% on 8 February 2026 (Jupiter data), and it accounted for roughly 95% of Solana graduations as of October 2025. On peak days in June 2026 it handled up to 83% of all Solana minting, at roughly 42,000 token launches in 24 hours.

The week of 3–9 August 2026 produced $10.03M in protocol fees, up 12% week on week — the first weekly total above $10M under the current reporting framework. That framing matters: the all-time daily record is $15.5M, set around the January 2025 anniversary. The August 2026 week was a recovery high, not an all-time high, and coverage that dropped the qualifier got it wrong.

Now the number that should govern how you read all of the above. Since January 2024, pump.fun has hosted 11.9 million token launches. Only 18 tokens have ever exceeded a $10M market cap, and 96 have exceeded $1M (10 June 2026). Not 18 currently — 18 ever.

Graduation rates: what is defensible and what is not

The most-cited statistic about pump.fun is the share of tokens that graduate, and most published figures are unusable because they omit the measurement window.

A study of 832,941 mints between 8 May and 10 June 2026 found a pooled graduation rate of 0.198% (95% CI 0.189–0.208%). But the authors observed each mint for only about six minutes post-launch and state explicitly that it should be read as a fast-regime rate and a lower bound on the true 24-hour rate. They also withdrew a sensitivity analysis that attempted to recover late graduations, after API verification found zero graduations in a 100-mint sample.

Separately, a rate of about 1.15% reported on 19 February 2026 was described at the time as the highest level in over seven months, following pump.fun's cashback-token launch — a peak, not a baseline. Solana Compass put the figure at "fewer than 2%" on 10 June 2026.

The honest editorial position: a defensible range for a true 24-hour graduation rate in 2026 is roughly 0.5–2% depending on window and market regime, and any single point estimate quoted without a measurement window tells you almost nothing. The dispersion between these figures is a definitional problem, not evidence that the market changed. We work through the methodology in why so few memecoins graduate, and cover what the word itself means across venues in what graduation means on a memecoin launchpad.

Two findings from that same study are more actionable than the headline rate. Launches advertising a Telegram graduated at 1.485% against 0.166% without — an 8.94× differential. And an initial market cap set above the default was the strongest single predictor of graduation. Neither tells you a token is good; both tell you that effort and capital at launch are visible in the data.

The legal position

pump.fun faces multiple US class actions alleging the sale of unregistered securities, plus a separate suit alleging an internal scheme to rig Solana memecoin launches, in which a whistleblower produced more than 5,000 messages.

None of this has been decided, and an allegation in a complaint is not a finding. But if you are choosing where to launch or where to trade, pending litigation over the venue's core business model is a real input, and the platforms that compete with pump.fun are not carrying the same exposure.

What this page does not tell you

It does not tell you whether any token on pump.fun is worth buying. The platform hosts tens of thousands of launches a day and the overwhelming majority of them go to zero within hours. Nothing in the mechanism above changes that, and the 18-out-of-11.9-million figure is the clearest evidence available.

It does not give you current constants. The virtual reserve parameters and the graduation threshold are unpublished as of 31 August 2026, so any article stating them precisely — including older versions of ours — is quoting stale documentation.

It does not tell you that graduation makes a token safe. A migrated pool on PumpSwap can still be dumped by a creator holding a large allocation, and migration says nothing about supply distribution. If you are checking a specific token, the per-token pages in the Meme Central feed carry a Solana safety report from RugCheck alongside the chart, and our launchpad comparison sets pump.fun's terms against every other major venue.

And it does not tell you how pump.fun compares to its nearest rivals on creator economics specifically — that is the subject of pump.fun vs Bags vs LetsBonk.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to launch a token on pump.fun?

The platform charges 0 SOL to create a token. You still pay Solana network fees to submit the transaction, and roughly 0.015 SOL is paid at graduation when liquidity migrates to PumpSwap. There is no listing fee, no review and no approval step, which is exactly why launch volumes run to tens of thousands a day.

What is pump.fun's trading fee?

1.25% total on bonding-curve trades as of 31 August 2026, split between the token's creator and the protocol. That is the platform fee only. Your real cost per trade also includes Solana priority fees, slippage against a thin curve, and any MEV extracted from your transaction — which on small trades frequently exceeds the 1.25%.

What market cap does a pump.fun token graduate at?

Reported figures sit between roughly $69K and $100K. The threshold is denominated in SOL rather than dollars, so the dollar figure moves with the SOL price. pump.fun no longer publishes the exact threshold in its documentation, so treat any precise number you see on a third-party page as unverified.

What percentage of pump.fun tokens graduate?

Under 2% on every credible 2026 measurement, but the spread between published figures is wide because they use different observation windows. A 0.198% figure covering May–June 2026 is explicitly a lower bound measured over about six minutes per mint. A roughly 1.15% figure from February 2026 was a seven-month high. Treat 0.5–2% as the defensible range.

Can you launch a pump.fun token on Robinhood Chain?

No. On 8 July 2026 pump.fun added trading and routing for Robinhood Chain tokens inside its app, so you can trade them without bridging. Token creation on pump.fun remains Solana-only. Deploying on Robinhood Chain requires a native venue there, and our per-venue analytics tracks which of those are actually taking volume.

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A lock is the one claim a buyer can check

pump.fun's atomic migration puts liquidity into PumpSwap, but that is a property of the venue, not of your token — and it says nothing about the supply the creator still holds. If you launch anywhere else, Team Finance, built by TrustSwap alongside Meme Central, locks LP tokens for a fixed term on Ethereum, Robinhood Chain, Polygon, Base and BNB, and the lock surfaces as a verified badge on the token's page in our feed. It does not stop a developer selling their own allocation, and a locked pool with concentrated supply is still a bad trade.

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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.