The bonding curve: price is how much SOL is in the pot
Every standard coin starts the same way: 1,000,000,000 tokens, of which 793.1M are sold on the curve. The curve acts as if it already holds 30 SOL and 1.073B tokens (its "virtual reserves") and keeps SOL × tokens constant. So the price depends on one thing only: how much real SOL buyers have put in, minus what sellers have taken out.
The curve gets steeper as it fills: the first 10 SOL moves the price far less than the last 10. From 0 to 85.005 SOL the price goes from 0.02796 to 0.41088 SOL per 1M tokens, about 14.7×. That's all the upside the curve itself offers before graduation.
Where the 1 billion tokens go
No tokens are reserved for the team on a standard coin. Mayhem coins differ (see #mayhem).
Early buyers get far more per SOL
Where the fee on a curve trade goes
Every buy and every sell on the curve pays a flat fee, charged in SOL. The split comes from the on-chain fee config.
Protocol 0.95% and creator 0.30% are on-chain (LP gets 0 on the curve). Half of the protocol share is set aside for PUMP buyback (buyback_basis_points = 5000), which is why it is drawn as 0.475% + 0.475%; pump.fun's fee page lists it as one "Protocol 0.95%". The Platform Fee applies only to trades placed in pump.fun's own web or mobile app, since Oct 17, 2026.
These numbers are for standard SOL-paired coins. USDC-paired and custom-pair coins use different reserves and fee settings, and creators of custom pairs can set a creator fee of up to 3% (see Every fee).
Graduation & BOOST: the curve hands off to a pool
The curve completes when the last of its 793.1M tokens is sold. At that point exactly 85.005 SOL (net of fees) is in it. Buyers paid about 86.07 SOL to get there once the 1.25% fee is added, or about 86.5 SOL if every buy went through the pump.fun app.
Price continuity. The 206.9M held-back tokens are sized so the pool opens where the curve ended: 84.99 SOL ÷ 206.9M tokens is 0.41078 SOL per 1M, against the curve's final 0.41088. The tiny gap is the migration fee. Graduation by itself doesn't make the price jump.
Synthetic migration. The buy that finishes the curve can be bigger than the room left in it. The part that overshoots is priced at the pool's rate rather than the curve's, so the price stays continuous across the hand-off. per pump.fun docs
BOOST: part of the pool's SOL is virtual
Since Jul 21, 2026, new pools graduate in BOOST mode by default. About 20% of the pool's quote reserve, ≈17.58 SOL, is booked as virtual quote reserves rather than real SOL. That amount funds automatic buy-and-burn of the token over roughly the first 5 minutes after migration. So the pool holds only ≈67.41 real SOL, while its opening price is still ≈0.411 SOL per 1M, because the price is set by real + virtual reserves together.
Illustrative timing: an even pace over 5 minutes is assumed. The real schedule and size of each buy are not published.
Reported, unconfirmed The ≈17.58 SOL figure, the ~5-minute window and the 20% share come from The Block's reporting and an independent on-chain analysis. pump.fun has not officially documented how the buy-and-burn executes on-chain. What it means for traders: in the first minutes after a BOOSTed graduation, part of the buying is the protocol's own, funded by SOL that came from the curve. When the budget runs out, that support stops.
PumpSwap pool: x · y = k, with a fee that depends on size
After graduation the coin trades in a PumpSwap pool. It's a constant-product market maker, the same idea as the curve: the pool keeps SOL reserve × token reserve constant, so every buy pushes the price up and every sell pushes it down. The difference is that there's no end point any more, and the fee now depends on the coin's market cap.
The pool opens with the 206.9M tokens that were held back plus ≈84.99 SOL of quote reserve, so its first price (≈0.411 SOL per 1M tokens) matches the curve's last. With BOOST, the default since July 2026, about 17.58 SOL of that quote reserve is virtual: it sets the price, but only ≈67.41 SOL is real SOL in the vault.
simplified This model treats the pool as plain x · y = k on its effective reserves (real + virtual SOL) at the moment of graduation, and takes the fee from the SOL side. Real BOOSTed pools carry virtual_quote_reserves, so the vault balances are not a plain constant product, and the BOOST buy-and-burn that runs over the first ~5 minutes isn't modelled. How those buybacks execute on-chain hasn't been officially confirmed by pump.fun. The fee tier is picked from the market cap before your trade.
LP tokens, and why they're burned
A normal AMM pool hands out LP tokens: a receipt for a share of the reserves, which the holder can redeem to pull liquidity out. When a pump.fun coin graduates, the LP tokens for its seed liquidity are burned. Nobody, the creator included, can withdraw the 206.9M tokens and the SOL that opened the pool. That rules out the classic "pull the liquidity" rug. It doesn't stop holders from selling into the pool, which is how prices fall.
The LP share of each PumpSwap fee (0.02% in the first tier, 0.20% after that) isn't paid out to anyone. It's left in the pool's reserves, so the pool gets slightly deeper with every trade.
Every fee, in one place
pump.fun takes a cut of every trade, and so does the coin's creator. On the bonding curve that's a flat 1.25%. After graduation, PumpSwap reads the coin's market cap and looks up one of 25 fee tiers (on mainnet, and in pump.fun's own fee docs). Bigger coins pay less in total. But the split changes too, and not in the way you'd guess.
PumpSwap tiers for SOL pairs
The total falls from 1.25% to 0.30% as a coin grows. But at 420 SOL of market cap, just above where every coin graduates (≈411 SOL), the creator's share jumps from 0.30% to 0.95% while protocol drops from 0.93% to 0.05%. From there, only the creator's share shrinks, step by step, down to 0.05% at 98,240 SOL. LP stays at 0.20% throughout.
The full fee table
| Where | Total | Protocol | Creator | LP | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bonding curve (SOL pairs) | 1.25% | 0.95% | 0.30% | 0 | Flat on every buy and sell, charged on the SOL side. Half the protocol fee goes to PUMP buyback (buyback_basis_points = 5000), so effectively 0.475% buyback + 0.475% protocol. pump.fun's docs list only "Protocol 0.95%". FD PD · TRADE_V3.md |
| Platform Fee (pump.fun app) | +0.45% | to pump.fun | New since Oct 17 2026. Trades placed in the pump.fun web or mobile app pay it on top; 0.40% with a referral code. On the curve that makes ≈1.70% per trade. FD | ||
| Migration (graduation) | 0.015 SOL | flat, once per coin | pool_migration_fee = 15,000,001 lamports, for every coin whatever its quote asset. OC · pump Global FD | ||
| PumpSwap, SOL pairs: tier 1 (< 420 SOL mcap) | 1.25% | 0.93% | 0.30% | 0.02% | Where a freshly graduated coin (≈411 SOL) starts. FD |
| PumpSwap, SOL pairs: tiers 2–25 (420 → 98,240+ SOL) | 1.20% → 0.30% | 0.05% | 0.95% → 0.05% | 0.20% | 24 more steps; all 25 are in the chart above. FD |
| USDC pairs | separate schedule | USDC-paired coins use their own 25-tier "stable" fee schedule (on-chain stable_fee_tiers); we don't reproduce it here. See pump.fun/docs/fees. Their curve starts with 4,292 USDC of virtual quote. FD | |||
| Custom pairs: curve | 1.25% | 0.95% | 0.30%* | 0 | Flat, no tiers, per pump.fun's fee docs. *The creator fee is configurable up to 3% (max_configurable_creator_fee_bps = 300). FD |
| Custom pairs: PumpSwap | 0.30% | 0.05% | 0.05%* | 0.20% | Flat, per pump.fun's fee docs. *Configurable up to 3%, as above. FD |
| PUMP buyback | 50% of the protocol fee | Curve and PumpSwap (buyback_basis_points = 5000). It can be 0, for example on Mayhem pools. PD · PUMP_SWAP_TRADE_V2.md | |||
Percentages are of the trade's SOL value. Not shown: BOOST's ≈17.58 SOL at graduation, which isn't a fee but comes out of the SOL buyers put into the curve (see Graduation).
Where a fee goes
Since Apr 28 2026, pump.fun says 50% of its net revenue goes to PUMP buyback-and-burn, down from 100% before. That's a company commitment about revenue overall. The on-chain 50% buyback share above is the per-trade mechanism you can check in the program config. CoinDesk · Apr 29 2026
Creator fees: one coin, one mode
The "creator" slice of every fee (0.30% on the curve, 0.95% → 0.05% in the pool) doesn't always go to the person who launched the coin. Each coin is in exactly one of four modes, and the mode decides who gets that slice. They're mutually exclusive: a coin doesn't pay its creator, a team and its holders at the same time.
Split the creator fee with up to 10 people
In team-split mode the creator fee is shared between up to 10 wallets. Shares must add up to exactly 100%. Try it below.
Illustration: the update count mirrors the program's rules; nothing here touches the chain.
The split can be changed once. After that, another update fails with FeeSharesAlreadyUpdated. But "locked" isn't absolute: in a community takeover (CTO), a pump.fun admin can reset the sharing config (admin_cto_sharing_config). Fee sharing across up to 10 wallets and the CTO controls were added in January 2026.
Fees for a social handle
A coin's creator fees can be pointed at an X handle rather than a wallet. Until the owner claims, the SOL sits in a program account called a SocialFeePda.
The claim isn't proven on-chain. pump.fun checks the person's identity off-chain, then its own key, the social_claim_authority, signs to release the funds. So you're trusting pump.fun to approve the right person.
Holder rewards: the fine print
- ≈US$20 minimum holding to be counted.
- Not guaranteed. pump.fun's own word. A reserve covers distribution costs, and there's a limit on how many holders are paid.
- Irreversible. A coin can be switched to holder rewards via a community takeover, and it can't be switched back.
- Who can trigger a payout?
- Anyone. Distributing the creator vault (
distribute_creator_fees_v2) is permissionless, and creators can claim any time. - Community takeover (CTO)
- Available on normal coins. Not allowed on Mayhem coins (
CtoNotAllowedForMayhemCoin). - Custom pairs
- The creator fee is configurable, up to 3%.
Charity coins: creator fees, sent to Donate.gg
A charity coin is an ordinary pump.fun coin with one change: its creator chooses to send the creator fee to charity instead of keeping it. On the curve that fee is 0.30% of every trade. pump.fun doesn't pay the causes itself. The fees go to Donate.gg, a separate third-party donation platform, which pays the charities.
The fees are denominated in SOL. Donate.gg handles the conversion and takes its own fee, so a cause receives somewhat less than the creator fees the coin generated. Only coins paired with SOL or USDC qualify. Coins on custom pairs can't be charity coins.
What happens on-chain
- Escrow account
DonationFeePda, described in the program's IDL as the "escrow PDA for donation relay". The coin's creator fees collect here.- Who moves the money
- Anyone.
crank_donation_fee_pdais permissionless: any wallet can call it to send what has built up in the escrow onward. Nobody needs pump.fun's or the creator's permission. - Token list
- The program also has a
mint_whitelistaccount. Its contents and how it is used aren't publicly documented. - Eligible pairs
- SOL- and USDC-paired coins only.
Unverified What we couldn't verify. You may see claims elsewhere that donations accept "any token", that up to 32 approved tokens can be donated, that donations are swapped to USDC in batches, or that leftover dust is burned. We found no public source for any of these. pump.fun's charity docs describe something simpler: creator fees in SOL, sent to Donate.gg, which converts them and pays the causes.
Mayhem mode: a second billion tokens and an AI trader
Most pump.fun coins have a fixed supply of 1 billion tokens. A Mayhem coin launches with 2 billion. The usual 1B goes to the bonding curve as normal. An extra 1B is minted into a Mayhem vault that an AI trading agent controls. During its trading window the agent trades from that vault, on the curve and later on PumpSwap. When the window ends, whatever is left in the vault is burned.
The burn only removes what the agent didn't sell. Every vault token it sold is now in someone's wallet and stays in circulation. So the final supply ends up somewhere between 1B and 2B, and the more the agent sells, the smaller each existing holder's share becomes.
ILLUSTRATIVE · The share sold is not public data. "Sold" means net sales: the agent also buys.
A Mayhem coin's timeline
The 24-hour window is what The Block and Cryptopolitan report. The program's on-chain global parameters contain a value of 24 that appears to be this window, but we haven't confirmed how it's decoded. You may see "up to 255 hours" elsewhere. 255 is simply the largest value a one-byte field can hold, not a documented window.
The rules
- Who turns it on
- The creator, at launch only (
create_v2withis_mayhem_mode). It can't be added to an existing coin. pump.fun controls a global switch (toggle_mayhem_mode) that decides whether the option is available at all. - Where the agent trades
- On the bonding curve and, after graduation, on PumpSwap.
- PUMP buyback
- 0% on Mayhem pools. On normal pools, half of the protocol fee goes to PUMP buyback. On Mayhem pools that share is set to zero.
- Community takeover (CTO)
- Not allowed. The program rejects it with
CtoNotAllowedForMayhemCoin. - Fee recipients
- Mayhem coins use their own separate set of "reserved" protocol fee recipients.
- Guardrails
- Reported caps on how large and how frequent the agent's trades can be. A "price band" limit has also been described, but we couldn't verify it. Unverified
What it means for your trade
Part I covered how the machine works. Part II puts your own SOL into it: where you enter, who your buy pays when earlier buyers sell, what fees cost you, and how often a coin ever graduates.
Where you get in decides almost everything
The same 1 SOL buys a very different number of tokens depending on how much is already in the curve. A big buy also moves the price against itself while it fills. That's price impact, and on a curve it's exact, not an estimate.
Simplified model: one buy at a time on a standard SOL curve with the 1.25% on-chain fee. The app's Platform Fee would cut your tokens by a further ≈0.45%.
The SOL you put in is what earlier buyers take out
Nobody outside pays a profit into the curve. When people who bought before you sell, they withdraw SOL from the same pot your buy just filled. This simulator starts right after your buy above, then lets earlier buyers sell some share of their tokens before you sell all of yours.
The rule the curve enforces: SOL out can never exceed SOL in. Minus fees, the profit of anyone who sells is paid by someone who bought after them. The last buyers in are the exit liquidity. (Simplified model, 1.25% fee each way, no new buyers after you.)
You start every trade behind
Each trade on the curve pays a 1.25% fee on-chain: 0.95% to the protocol (half of it earmarked for PUMP buyback) and 0.30% to the coin's creator. Since Oct 17, 2026, trades placed through pump.fun's own web or mobile app add a 0.45% Platform Fee (0.40% with a referral code), so app users pay about 1.70% per trade. A buy and a sell pay it twice.
This is why flipping the same coin over and over loses money even when the price goes nowhere. Flat-price model: it ignores price impact, which makes real round trips cost more. Fee rates are set by pump.fun's fee program and the app and can change, so check the current numbers before you trade.
Most coins never get there
Over pump.fun's lifetime, roughly 1% of coins have graduated. In 2026 the rate has swung widely. An arXiv study of 833k launches found just 0.198% graduated. The Block put June's average at about 0.8%, while DEXTools, citing Dune, reported about 0.26% in mid-June. After BOOST launched in late July, The Block reported a 2.5% weekly average and a 6.7% peak on a single day. Whichever number you take, almost every coin stalls somewhere on the curve.
1,000 launches at the arXiv rate
Each dot is one launch. Highlighted: the ≈2 that graduate at 0.198%. (Illustrative placement.)
Reported graduation rates
Different periods and methods, so these are not directly comparable. Even the best single day left 93 of 100 coins on the curve.
Before you buy, look for
- How much is already in. Use the entry simulator above. Past about 60 SOL in, most of the curve's upside is gone.
- Who holds the supply. If a handful of wallets bought in the first seconds, they're the ones your buy pays.
- Bundled launches. A creator buying through many wallets in the launch block looks like a crowd but sells like one person.
- Where the SOL came from. A big jump from one wallet can leave as fast as it came in.
- Your exit. Before graduation, the only buyers for your tokens are people who arrive after you. After a BOOSTed graduation, early buying may be the protocol's own buy-and-burn, which runs out.
Fact-check: pumpfun.how
pumpfun.how ("How Pump Works", by Shaw) is a well-made visual explainer, and much of it is right. We checked it on Nov 1, 2026 against pump.fun's public docs repo (HEAD Oct 13, 2026), pump.fun's fee and charity pages, and live mainnet accounts. These parts hold up:
- The bonding-curve math: 1B supply, 793.1M sold on the curve, 206.9M kept for the pool, 30 SOL / 1.073B virtual reserves.
- The 1.25% curve fee split, shown as buyback 0.475% / protocol 0.475% / creator 0.30%.
- The 0.015 SOL migration fee and the LP burn at graduation.
- All 25 PumpSwap fee tiers, which match mainnet.
- The 10-person creator fee split that can be changed once.
- Cashback being deprecated, and no community takeover (CTO) on Mayhem coins.
- The layout works on phones, with no sideways scroll at 375px.
Below is what we found missing, unverified or wrong. Each row links to the source we checked, and the screenshots further down show both sides.
| Claim on pumpfun.how | What's actually true | Verdict | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| "1.25% fee on curve trades" (hero) | The 1.25% protocol fee is correct. But since Oct 17, 2026, trades placed in the pump.fun web or mobile app also pay a 0.45% Platform Fee (0.40% with a referral code), so app users pay about 1.70% per curve trade. The Platform Fee isn't mentioned anywhere on the page. | Incomplete | FD · Platform Fee Proof |
| "1,000,000,000 tokens in every coin" (hero) | Mayhem coins mint an extra 1B tokens into a Mayhem vault, so they launch with 2B. The site's own Mayhem panel shows "1B + 1B". Tokens the AI agent sells stay in circulation, which dilutes holders. Only unsold vault tokens are burned. | Wrong for Mayhem | PD · idl (create_v2) The Block · Nov 18 2025 Proof |
| "Bot trading window: up to 255 h" (Mayhem) | Reports give the window as 24 hours, with unused agent tokens burned after 24 h. An on-chain parameter holds the value 24, but we haven't confirmed how it decodes. 255 is the largest value a one-byte (u8) field can hold, so "up to 255 h" looks like a type limit rather than the actual window. | Conflicts with reports | The Block · 24 hours Proof |
| Donation: "any token in, dollars out", "Up to 32 approved tokens", "swap → USDC", "Dust is burned" | None of these is sourced. pump.fun's charity page says fees go to Donate.gg, a third party, are denominated in SOL, and are available only for coins paired with SOL or USDC. Donate.gg handles the conversion and charges its own fee. On-chain, a donation escrow (DonationFeePda) and a mint whitelist exist, but we found nothing confirming the 32-token limit, a USDC swap or a dust burn. | Unsourced, conflicts with docs | CD · Charity Coins PD · idl Proof |
| Donation presented as one of pump.fun's "five Solana programs" | Donate.gg is never named. pump.fun's docs say it "integrates the Donate.gg platform" and does not process or custody donation funds itself. | Incomplete | CD · Donate.gg Proof |
| Page as a whole: footer and framing | There are no sources, no as-of date and no author credit on the page. Nothing is labelled "simplified", there's no risk or graduation-rate context, and there's no "not financial advice" note. The footer holds only section links. | Missing | Proof · footer |
| Scope: default SOL-paired coins only | The page leaves out USDC pairs (which have their own 25-tier schedule), custom pairs (flat fees), configurable creator / holder-reward fees of up to 3%, and BOOST. BOOST has been the default at graduation since July 2026: about 20% of the pool's quote reserve funds automatic buy-and-burn in roughly the first five minutes. | Incomplete | FD · USDC / custom pairs The Block · BOOST Proof |
| "≈85 SOL to graduate" (hero) | 85.005 SOL is the net amount the curve needs. Buyers pay about 86.07 SOL once the 1.25% fee is included, and about 86.5 SOL through the app. | Incomplete | PD · PUMP_PROGRAM_README FD |
| Buyback / protocol labels | The curve widget splits the fee into "Buyback 0.475%" and "Protocol 0.475%", while the fee-tier chart shows a single "Protocol" share that includes buyback. The numbers aren't wrong, but the labels don't match between widgets. | Inconsistent | PD · TRADE_V3.md |
| "Change the split: once, then 🔒" | The split can be updated once. But a pump.fun admin can reset it during a community takeover (admin_cto_sharing_config), so the lock isn't absolute. |
Incomplete | PD · CREATOR_FEE_SHARING.md Proof |
| "Owner claims after proving it's them" (social-handle fees) | Identity is checked off-chain, and the claim is signed by pump.fun's social_claim_authority key. pump.fun's key approves the release; the page doesn't say so. |
Incomplete | PD · idl (SocialFeePda) |
| "Fee tiers in the book: up to 50" | Mainnet has 25 SOL tiers (and a separate 25-tier USDC schedule). We found no source for a 50-tier limit. | Unverified | FD · fee tiers Proof |
| Creator-hub diagram: creator, team, holders and cashback paid together | These are mutually exclusive modes for a coin. A coin pays its creator, or a team split, or holder rewards, or (legacy) cashback. They aren't paid out of one vault at the same time. | Wrong | PD · HOLDER_REWARDS_README FD |
| Mayhem vault animation: 38% sold | The animation drains a fixed 38% of the vault before burning the rest (1 - .38 * u in the site's app.js). That figure isn't from data, and it isn't labelled as illustrative. |
Unlabelled illustration | pumpfun.how · app.js |
| Accessibility: 5 range sliders | Each slider has a visible text label, but it isn't tied to the input (no for, no aria-label). Screen readers announce them without a name. |
Accessibility gap | WCAG 4.1.2 |
| Accessibility: 36 SVG diagrams | None of the 36 SVGs on the page has a text alternative (no role="img", aria-label or <title>). |
Accessibility gap | WCAG 1.1.1 |
| Accessibility: 5 videos | The videos have no caption tracks and no native controls. Each has only a custom play button. | Accessibility gap | WCAG 1.2.2 |
FD = pump.fun/docs/fees (last updated Oct 17, 2026). CD = pump.fun/docs/charitycoins (last updated Apr 27, 2026). PD = github.com/pump-fun/pump-public-docs (HEAD Oct 13, 2026). Accessibility counts come from the live page's DOM on Nov 1, 2026.
Side by side
Each image pairs what pumpfun.how says with the primary source or the press report we checked it against.
Original captures
Unedited crops of each page as it appeared on Nov 1, 2026. Select an image to open it at full size.
We checked this carefully, but we may still have missed something, or pump.fun may change its docs. If you spot an error in this section or anywhere on this page, corrections are welcome, and we'll update the page and note the change.