The Pump.fun bonding curve
Every coin launched on Pump.fun starts on a bonding curve — a deterministic pricing function that quotes a buy and sell price from on-chain reserves. There is no orderbook, no market-makers, and no off-chain matching. The price you pay is a pure function of how many tokens are in circulation.
How the curve quotes a price
The Pump.fun bonding curve is a constant-product AMM, similar to the math used by Uniswap and other automated market makers. Two virtual reserves — SOL and the coin's supply — are multiplied together to form an invariant. Every trade adjusts one reserve up and the other down to keep the invariant constant. The result:
- Every buy moves the price up.
- Every sell moves the price down.
- Price impact scales with trade size — large trades pay a worse fill than small ones.
- There is no front-running by market-makers because there are no market-makers.
Graduation to PumpSwap
Once a coin's market cap on the bonding curve hits the graduation threshold, the curve is closed and the entire liquidity pool is migrated atomically to PumpSwap. From that point on the coin trades on PumpSwap's deeper liquidity pool. Graduation is automatic and irreversible — there's no human step.
What gets locked, what doesn't
When a coin graduates to PumpSwap, the migrated SOL and tokens become the canonical liquidity pool. Pump.fun does not seed or remove this liquidity after graduation — the pool is owned by the protocol.
Fees on the bonding curve
The bonding curve charges a 1.25% total trading fee, split between the coin's creator and the protocol. See the full fee schedule for exact percentages and how post-graduation PumpSwap fees compare.
Why a bonding curve at all?
The bonding curve solves the cold-start problem that kills most token launches. A new memecoin has no liquidity, no orderbook, and no price discovery. The bonding curve provides all three the moment the coin is created — anyone can buy or sell instantly, and the quoted price is honest because it's just the AMM math. That's why Pump.fun coins are tradable from second one rather than after a presale or LP-seeding step.
Want to launch one?
See the step-by-step how to create a coin guide, or jump straight to the launch page.