How Pump.fun works

The bonding curve: how pricing works

When you create a token on Pump.fun, it does not start with a traditional order book or liquidity pool. Instead, all trades happen against a bonding curve, which is a mathematical formula that sets the price.

The formula is simple in concept: every buy increases the price, every sell decreases it. The more tokens that have been bought, the higher the price per token. This means early buyers pay less and later buyers pay more.

There is no market maker and no counterparty on the other side of your trade. The curve itself holds the SOL from buys and releases SOL on sells. The price at any moment depends only on how much has been bought so far.

Creating a token

Anyone with a Phantom wallet and some SOL can create a token. You fill in a name, ticker, description and image, connect your wallet, and approve one transaction. There is no creation fee beyond the Solana network cost.

The moment the transaction confirms, your token exists and trading is open. There is no waiting period, no listing step, no approval. Your token appears on the Pump.fun board alongside every other token created that minute.

The Pump.fun token creator can prefill these details from themes graduating this week, or you can create directly on pump.fun.

Trading on the curve

Once a token exists, anyone can buy or sell it directly on Pump.fun. Each trade goes through the bonding curve, not through other users.

The trading fee (a percentage of each transaction) goes to the platform and, since 2025, partly to the token creator. See Pump.fun fees for the current rates.

Price moves continuously. There is no spread and no slippage from thin order books. The formula is deterministic: put in X SOL, get Y tokens, move the price by Z.

Graduation: from curve to DEX

A token starts on the bonding curve and stays there until enough SOL has been bought in. When the curve reaches its target, the token graduates. Pump.fun automatically moves the liquidity to PumpSwap, its own decentralised exchange.

After graduation, trading continues on PumpSwap with a traditional liquidity pool. The token has "left the curve" and trades like any other Solana token. The contract address does not change.

The SOL threshold for graduation is set by Pump.fun and published at pump.fun/docs/create-coin. It can change over time.

Most tokens never graduate. Whether a token graduates depends on demand, not on time. Some tokens do it in minutes; most stall on the curve indefinitely.

King of the hill

Pump.fun shows a live ranking called "king of the hill." This is not about market cap or volume alone; it ranks tokens by how close they are to graduation and how fast they are moving.

Being king of the hill means your token is at the top of the Pump.fun board, getting the most visibility. It is a temporary position that changes constantly as new tokens are created and existing ones gain or lose momentum.

This ranking drives attention. Tokens that reach king of the hill often see a surge in buys, which can push them to graduation. But it can also attract sellers once the position is lost.

The first hour matters

Pump.fun shows new tokens sorted by recency by default. A token that gets attention in its first hour stays visible; one that does not drops down the board and rarely recovers.

This is why sharing the contract address immediately after launch matters. The creator’s job in the first hour is to bring attention; the bonding curve handles everything else.

What Pump.fun does not do

Pump.fun creates standard SPL tokens on Solana. It does not audit tokens, verify creators, or guarantee anything about a token’s future. Every token is as real as any other, and every token can go to zero.

The platform never holds your keys. All transactions are signed in your own wallet. If you lose access to your wallet, Pump.fun cannot recover your tokens or SOL.

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