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How to Use pump.fun

From memecoin.wiki, the free memecoin encyclopedia
How to Use pump.fun
How to Use pump.fun
Image: original illustration, memecoin.wiki
updatedAugust 2026
reading time9 minutes

Using pump.fun means connecting a Solana wallet, buying and selling tokens along their bonding curve before they graduate to an open market, and understanding the platform's livestreaming and creator reward layers that sit on top of the basic launch and trade mechanic.

Contents
  1. 1 What pump.fun is
  2. 2 How the bonding curve works
  3. 3 Buying a token on the curve
  4. 4 Understanding graduation and the graduation rate
  5. 5 Selling and taking profit
  6. 6 The livestream layer
  7. 7 Creator rewards: how creators earn fees
  8. 8 The app ecosystem
  9. 9 Risks specific to pump.fun
  10. 10 References

Using pump.fun means connecting a Solana wallet such as Phantom, creating or buying tokens that trade along an automated bonding curve rather than a normal order book, watching whether a token completes that curve and "graduates" to an open market, and optionally engaging with the platform's livestreaming and creator reward features that turned it from a launch mechanism into a broader attention economy.

What pump.fun is

pump.fun is a meme coin launchpad on Solana, launched January 19, 2024 by three then twenty something English entrepreneurs, Noah Tweedale, Alon Cohen and Dylan Kerler, operating through the UK company Baton Corporation Ltd (see pump fun founders). Its core promise is that anyone can create a token in seconds for less than two dollars, with no presale and no team allocation, and that every token starts on identical footing on a bonding curve rather than through a negotiated sale. By 2025 it had become one of the highest revenue applications ever built on a blockchain, generating an estimated $971 million in gross protocol revenue across 2025 and roughly $124.7 million in the first quarter of 2026 alone, over 30 percent of all Solana application revenue that quarter.

How the bonding curve works

Every pump.fun token mints a fixed supply of one billion units, of which 800 million are sold along a constant product bonding curve seeded with virtual reserves so early prices move smoothly rather than starting at zero. Buying pushes the price up along the curve; selling pushes it back down, since the contract itself is the counterparty for every trade, at a fee of about 1 percent. A token "graduates" once the curve accumulates roughly 85 SOL in real reserves, historically corresponding to a market capitalization near $69,000; the accumulated liquidity is then deposited automatically into a decentralized exchange, originally raydium and, since March 20, 2025, pumpswap, pump.fun's own automated market maker. Because the liquidity handling is fully automated and the creator never custodies the pool, the classic liquidity withdrawal rug pull is structurally impossible on the curve, though a dev can still dump their own token holdings.

Buying a token on the curve

Buying starts with connecting a wallet, almost always Phantom, to pump.fun's website or its dedicated mobile app, released in February 2025 and rebuilt around speed in a June 2025 update that added a one click "tap to ape" flow. Clicking buy on any token page sends SOL into the curve and returns tokens at the curve's current price; there is no order book to navigate and no liquidity pool to select, only the trade size and, on most interfaces, a priority fee setting that determines how quickly the transaction lands relative to everyone else buying the same token at the same moment. Traders who want more tooling than the native site offers, such as multi token watchlists or wallet tracking, commonly buy pump.fun launches through a third party terminal instead, including Axiom, Photon or GMGN, all of which stream new pump.fun launches directly into their discovery feeds.

Understanding graduation and the graduation rate

"Graduation" is pump.fun's term for a token completing its bonding curve and migrating to open market trading, and the graduation rate, the share of launched tokens that ever reach that point, is the single most cited statistic about the platform because it quantifies how rarely a token survives even its first stage. Data compiled in early 2025 put the lifetime graduation rate at about 1.4 percent, and the daily rate fell as low as roughly 0.26 percent in June 2026 amid a broader meme coin slump, before the 2026 BOOST launch mechanism, which directly rewards progress toward graduation, pushed it back up to a six month high of about 6.7 percent on its best single day. In plain terms, on an average day in mid 2026 fewer than three tokens in a thousand ever left the curve at all, and graduation itself is a funnel checkpoint rather than a success signal, since most graduated tokens also decline toward zero afterward.

Selling and taking profit

Selling works exactly like buying in reverse: while a token is still on the curve, selling returns SOL from the same contract at the current price, and after graduation, selling routes through pumpswap or jupiter like any DEX trade. Because the dev's wallet is publicly labeled on pump.fun and by every wallet tracker, the moment a creator sells is broadcast instantly as a labeled event known simply as "dev sold," which typically triggers a rush of other holders selling in the same seconds, a dynamic the trenches call pvp. Traders who exit before that cascade are, definitionally, selling to someone else, the concept the wiki covers as exit liquidity; identifying who that will be, and not being it, is treated as the actual game being played on any pump.fun chart.

The livestream layer

Beyond launching and trading tokens, pump.fun livestreaming lets a token's creator broadcast video directly on its page, turning a launch into a live performance for potential buyers. Introduced in 2024, the feature was suspended entirely on November 25, 2024 after a wave of extreme broadcasts, including threats of violence and animal abuse used to move token prices, and returned with added moderation in April 2025. Once tied to dynamic creator fees in 2025, streaming became a genuine income source: in the creator rewards gold rush of September 2025, about $20 million in creator rewards was claimed platform wide in a single week, former esports player BunnyFuFuu earned $217,000 in his first two days streaming, and a pair of teenage streamers earned over $83,000 in one weekend for playing unreleased Drake and Future songs. The same incentive structure produced pump.fun GO in June 2026, a bounty marketplace under the slogan "Pay ANYONE to do ANYTHING" that drew immediate backlash over extreme listings and briefly dragged the PUMP token to an all time low.

Creator rewards: how creators earn fees

pump.fun introduced creator revenue sharing on May 12, 2025, paying token creators 0.05 percent of their coin's trading volume in SOL, and overhauled the model on September 2, 2025 under project ascend, which pays creators a tiered share of trading fees on pumpswap, up to 0.95 percent on small tokens and declining as market capitalization rises. The change inverted the platform's old incentives: a creator now earns more by keeping a token alive and traded than by abandoning it for a new launch, and it worked in the short run, with creators earning over $2.4 million in the first 24 hours of the new system. On January 9, 2026 the model was expanded further, allowing fee splits across up to 10 wallets and transferable ownership of a coin's fee stream, and in February 2026 pump.fun added cashback coins, letting a creator route fees back to traders instead of to themselves. See creator fees for the mechanic in general and how rival launchpads such as Bags have built their own variants of it.

The app ecosystem

pump.fun expanded well beyond the original website through a run of 2025 and 2026 acquisitions. In July 2025 it bought the wallet tracker and trader leaderboard kolscan, its first acquisition; in October 2025 it acquired the multichain terminal Padre and rebranded it Terminal, a deal that crashed the PADRE token about 80 percent and forced a compensation airdrop; and in February 2026 it acquired the execution terminal Vyper to expand cross chain trading. On July 12, 2025 the platform held one of the largest initial coin offerings in crypto history for its own PUMP token, raising about $1.3 billion combined across a public and private sale, and it has since funded a large buyback and burn program, including a single burn of about $370 million, roughly 36 percent of circulating supply, on April 29, 2026.

Risks specific to pump.fun

Every risk that applies to meme coins generally applies here (see How to Buy a Meme Coin for the broader checklist), but pump.fun carries some risks tied specifically to its own history. The platform and its founders face consolidated securities litigation in the United States alleging the sale of unregistered securities and, in amended filings, racketeering (see pump fun lawsuits), claims the company disputes and which remained in the motion to dismiss phase as of mid 2026. Its livestreaming and bounty features have twice produced serious moderation failures, in November 2024 and again around the June 2026 GO launch. And the platform itself was the target of a direct theft in May 2024, when a former employee used flash loans and privileged access to drain about 12,300 SOL from its bonding curve contracts before being arrested in London two days later (see pump.fun insider exploit). None of this is a reason the platform cannot be used; it is the specific, dated record of what has already gone wrong on it.

References

See also
Category: Guides
Last updated 2026-08-19