Propose an edit: How to Launch a Meme Coin

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Title Category One sentence summary Infobox, one "key: value" per line Article body, markdown, use [[wiki links]] and end with a ## References section

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 [[Solana|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|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.

## The legal gray zone

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

- Wikipedia, Pump.fun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump.fun
- CoinGecko Learn, LetsBonk.fun Solana memecoin launchpad guide: https://www.coingecko.com/learn/letsbonk-fun-solana-memecoin-launchpad-guide
- CoinGecko Learn, What is Believe token launchpad: https://www.coingecko.com/learn/what-is-believe-token-launchpad
- The Defiant, LAUNCHCOIN tumbles as Believe app's revenue falls 94% from May peak: https://thedefiant.io/news/defi/launchcoin-tumbles-as-believe-app-s-revenue-falls-94-from-may-peak
- Solana Compass, Bags: https://solanacompass.com/projects/BAGS
- CoinMarketCap Academy, pump token Project Ascend launches 10x creator rewards: https://coinmarketcap.com/academy/article/pump-token-project-ascend-launches-10x-creator-rewards
- Decrypt, pump.fun's new fee model hands out $2M to creators in first 24 hours: https://decrypt.co/337872/pump-funs-new-fee-model-hands-out-2m-to-creators-in-first-24-hours
- Decrypt, pump.fun streamers earned $83,000 from leaking Drake and Future songs: https://decrypt.co/339446/pump-fun-streamers-leaking-drake-future-songs
- crypto.news, pump.fun flips creator fees, launches trader cashback: https://crypto.news/pump-fun-flips-creator-fees-launches-trader-cashback/
- The Defiant, Bags launchpad activity surges after GAS token soars 700%: https://thedefiant.io/news/defi/bags-launchpad-activity-surges-after-gas-token-soars-700
- X (Phineas_Sol), on Bwam's deployment playbook: https://x.com/Phineas_Sol/status/2042904812790960515
- X (ashxonchain), tracing Bwam wallet outflows: https://x.com/ashxonchain/status/2050530283066462484
- Decrypt, Solana meme coin presales, $150 million, what could go wrong: https://decrypt.co/222417/solana-meme-coin-presales-150-million-what-could-go-wrong
- Cointelegraph, 12 Solana presale memecoins abandoned after one month: https://cointelegraph.com/news/12-solana-presale-memecoins-abandoned-after-one-month
- Solidus Labs via CoinDesk, 98% of tokens on pump.fun have been rug pulls or an act of fraud, new report says: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/05/07/98-of-tokens-on-pump-fun-have-been-rug-pulls-or-an-act-of-fraud-new-report-says
- DEXTools News, pump.fun in 2026, graduation rate collapses to 0.26 percent: https://www.dextools.io/news/pump-fun-graduation-collapse-solana-fees-2026
- crypto.news, court dismisses lawsuit over Caitlyn Jenner memecoin: https://crypto.news/court-dismisses-lawsuit-over-caitlyn-jenner-memecoin/
- CourtListener, Aguilar v. Baton Corporation Ltd docket: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69593359/aguilar-v-baton-corporation-ltd-dba-pumpfun/
- Decrypt, Hawk Tuah girl added to Solana meme coin lawsuit after cooperating with law firm: https://decrypt.co/349110/hawk-tuah-girl-solana-meme-coin-lawsuit-after-cooperating-law-firm
- Buenos Aires Herald, LIBRA crypto scandal, status of the legal inquiry in Argentina and the US: https://buenosairesherald.com/politics/judiciary/libra-crypto-scandal-whats-the-status-of-the-legal-inquiry-in-argentina-and-the-us

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