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How to Launch a Meme Coin

From memecoin.wiki, the free memecoin encyclopedia
How to Launch a Meme Coin
How to Launch a Meme Coin
Image: original illustration, memecoin.wiki
updatedAugust 2026
reading time9 minutes

Launching a meme coin means picking a launchpad such as pump.fun, LetsBonk.fun, Believe or Bags, deploying a token for a few dollars in SOL, and understanding that creator fees are now the main way launchers earn money, that most launches never graduate and die within hours, and that the legal status of the whole activity is unsettled.

Contents
  1. 1 Choosing a launchpad
  2. 2 What creation actually costs
  3. 3 Creator rewards: the economics of launching
  4. 4 What deployers actually do
  5. 5 Fair launch, stealth launch or presale
  6. 6 Avoiding a bundle and sniper backlash
  7. 7 Why most launches die
  8. 8 The legal gray zone
  9. 9 References

Launching a meme coin means choosing a launchpad, most commonly pump.fun, LetsBonk.fun, Believe or Bags, deploying a token for a few dollars in SOL with no code required, and then living or dying by how much attention and trading volume the token attracts in its first minutes, since creator fees rather than any presale are how a launcher actually gets paid, and the large majority of launches never complete their bonding curve at all.

Choosing a launchpad

The four launchpads named above dominate current Solana launch volume, and each has a distinct economic model. pump.fun, launched January 19, 2024, remains the default, with a fixed one billion token supply per coin, an automated bonding curve, and no presale or team allocation by design. LetsBonk.fun, created by the BONK community with raydium's LaunchLab infrastructure on April 25, 2025, copies the pump.fun mechanic while routing a share of fees back into the BONK ecosystem, and briefly overtook pump.fun's market share in July 2025 before falling back. Believe, founded by Ben Pasternak, moved token creation onto X itself, letting a user deploy a coin by replying to the platform's account, splitting trading fees 50/50 between the platform and the creator; it drove the 2025 internet capital markets narrative before its revenue fell 94 percent from its May 2025 peak. Bags, at bags.fm, hardcodes a 1 percent creator royalty on every trade and lets a launcher route up to 90 percent of it to any social handle, including someone who never agreed to have a coin launched in their name.

What creation actually costs

Deploying the token itself is cheap everywhere. pump.fun advertises token creation for less than two dollars in SOL, essentially the cost of a Solana transaction plus a small platform charge, with no code and no smart contract deployment required from the launcher. The ongoing cost instead sits in trading fees paid by buyers and sellers, roughly 1 percent on pump.fun's curve, about 1 percent on LetsBonk swaps, and 1 percent on Bags trades, plus whatever a launcher spends on marketing, KOL promotion or their own opening buy to seed activity. There is no listing fee, no minimum liquidity requirement, and nothing stopping the same wallet from deploying hundreds of tokens a day, which is exactly what industrial deployers do (see below).

Creator rewards: the economics of launching

The reason launching became a recurring business rather than a one time extraction is creator fees. pump.fun introduced revenue sharing on May 12, 2025, paying creators 0.05 percent of their coin's trading volume, then overhauled it on September 2, 2025 under project ascend, which pays creators a tiered share of trading fees, up to 0.95 percent on small tokens and declining as market capitalization grows, specifically to reward creators for keeping a token alive rather than abandoning it for the next launch. The model paid out fast: creators earned over $2.4 million in the first 24 hours of the new system, and in the September 2025 creator rewards gold rush, about $20 million in creator rewards was claimed platform wide in a single week, with individual streamers earning six figures in days. On January 9, 2026 pump.fun expanded the system to allow fee splits across up to 10 wallets and transferable fee ownership, and in February 2026 added cashback coins that let a creator route fees to traders instead of themselves. Bags pushed the model furthest by making the royalty a permanent, transferable claim tied to a social handle rather than a wallet a creator has to actively manage, producing what the wiki's lexicon documents as the claim meta, screenshots of claimed fees functioning as a status symbol in their own right.

What deployers actually do

Most people picture a launcher as a single person promoting one coin, but the highest volume activity on pump.fun comes from automated industrial deployers who treat token creation as a production line. Bwam, a pseudonymous wallet known only by its vanity address, is the clearest documented example: community trackers credited the wallet with more than 100,000 token launches, and a March 2026 dossier estimated 85,033 coin launches with $5.8 million in tracked profit and an average holding time of just 34 minutes per position. The pattern observed on chain is consistent, a token deployed within moments of a tweet or meme going viral, a small buy from the dev wallet itself to seed the chart, and an exit within minutes regardless of what happens afterward, repeated dozens or hundreds of times a day. This is not a hidden or unusual strategy; it is a visible, trackable business model that supplies a large share of the raw launch volume behind every platform's graduation rate statistics, running on the same pvp logic that governs every other trade in the trenches.

Fair launch, stealth launch or presale

A launcher choosing how to introduce a token is really choosing between three established patterns. A fair launch gives every buyer the same starting price and no advance access, the model pump.fun's bonding curve enforces by default, though onchain analysis routinely finds nominally fair launches with majority supply already held by a sniper cluster or a coordinated bundle. A stealth launch reveals the contract address only after deployment, denying bots and insiders any advance notice, at the cost that almost nobody is watching when the token appears. A presale, selling allocations before public trading, is largely a cautionary tale on Solana: after the presale funded launch of book of meme in March 2024 went viral, ZachXBT tracked roughly 796,000 SOL, then worth about $149 million, flowing into 33 copycat presale addresses within days, and Cointelegraph later found at least 12 of those coins completely abandoned within a month. Most current launchpad activity has settled on the fair launch pattern precisely because it removes the presale operator as a point of failure, even though it does not remove insider advantage entirely.

Avoiding a bundle and sniper backlash

A launcher who buys their own token to seed activity is doing something normal; the same action executed across many hidden wallets in the same block, a bundle, is treated very differently by the market once discovered. Tools such as Bubblemaps and RugCheck surface bundled and sniper wallets automatically, and a token flagged as heavily bundled or run by a suspected cabal draws public accusation on crypto Twitter regardless of the launcher's actual intent, since concentrated hidden supply lets insider wallets sell into buyers who become exit liquidity. If a launch is abandoned, whether by design or because the dev simply loses interest, a token that still has active buyers can be revived through a cto, in which remaining holders take over marketing and community management while the underlying contract and supply distribution stay exactly as the original creator left them.

Why most launches die

The base rate is stark. A study by compliance firm Solidus Labs of more than seven million pump.fun tokens created between January 2024 and March 2025 found that 98.6 percent had collapsed below $1,000 in liquidity, reported by CoinDesk and Cointelegraph in May 2025, and the platform's graduation rate, the share of tokens that ever complete their bonding curve, fell as low as about 0.26 percent in June 2026 before recovery efforts pushed it back toward multi month highs. Even graduation is not survival: analyses of graduated cohorts found that most graduated tokens also decline toward zero after migrating to open trading. Attention is the actual scarce resource being competed for, not code or liquidity, which is why a launch's outcome is decided far more by whether it catches a wave of organic interest, a viral tweet, a trending meme, a celebrity mention, than by anything the launcher configures at deployment.

Launching a token currently sits in a genuinely unsettled legal position. In February 2025 the United States SEC staff stated that typical meme coins generally do not involve the offer and sale of securities, a position echoed in a May 2025 court dismissal of the class action over Caitlyn Jenner's token, according to reporting by crypto.news. At the same time, pump.fun and its founders face consolidated litigation in the Southern District of New York, Aguilar v. Baton Corporation Ltd, alleging the platform's tokens were sold as unregistered securities and, in amended filings, that the platform operated a racketeering enterprise, seeking treble damages plaintiffs valued at roughly $5.5 billion; the case remained in the motion to dismiss phase as of mid 2026 with no ruling on the merits (see pump fun lawsuits). The UK's Financial Conduct Authority separately warned in December 2024 that pump.fun might be operating without permission, and the platform responded by blocking UK users entirely. Two of the era's highest profile launches show how personal the exposure can get for a launcher who is not anonymous: the HAWK coin collapse produced a still pending class action naming Haliey Welch personally after she initially cooperated with the plaintiffs' lawyers investigating others, and the LIBRA scandal triggered a criminal fraud investigation in Argentina alongside civil litigation in the United States after a token promoted by a sitting president collapsed within hours. None of these outcomes are guaranteed for any given launch, and reporting on all of them describes allegations rather than settled findings, but they are the documented record a launcher is choosing to enter.

References

See also
  • How to Spot a Rug Pull A rug pull can usually be caught before it happens by running five checks on a new token,
  • How to Use pump.fun Using pump.fun means connecting a Solana wallet, buying and selling tokens along their bon
  • Memecoin Slang Dictionary Memecoin slang is the shared vocabulary crypto Twitter and the Solana trenches use to desc
  • pump.fun Statistics pump.fun has generated more than 1.2 billion dollars in cumulative revenue since its Janua
  • Trojan vs BonkBot vs Maestro Trojan and BonkBot both charge 1 percent falling to about 0.75 to 0.9 percent with cashbac
Category: Guides
Last updated 2026-08-19