pump.fun basics5 of 9
What is a bonding curve?
A bonding curve is a price rule for a new coin. Every buy raises the price a little, every sell lowers it, and you trade with the curve itself, not another person.
A price list that moves
Every coin made on pump.fun, a meme coin launchpad, starts life on a bonding curve. There's no order book and no seller on the other side.
On the stock market, you buy from another person. When you buy a share on Robinhood, the market finds someone selling at a price you'll pay, and the trade goes through between the two of you. A bonding curve has no other person. You buy from a program that holds the coin's unsold tokens and follows one rule: the more it has sold, the more the next token costs.
Think of a ticket booth with 793.1 million tickets and a price board that ticks up with every ticket sold. Hand one back and the price ticks down again. Nobody haggles, nobody sets the price by hand, and the booth is always open while it has tickets left. When the last one sells, the booth closes and the coin moves to an open market.
Try pump.fun's bonding curve
This is pump.fun's real curve for a coin paired with SOL. Drag the coin along it and pick a buy. The shaded strip is your buy. Further along, the curve is taller, so the same SOL covers a narrower strip.
At launch, the same 1 SOL bought 34.2M tokens.
How the pump.fun bonding curve works
pump.fun's curve is two numbers multiplied together. A new coin starts with 30 SOL and 1,073,000,000 tokens on its books. The 30 SOL is make-believe, and so are 279.9 million of the tokens: nobody deposited that SOL, and those tokens never sell. They're there to set the starting price and the curve's shape.
- 793.1M sold on the curve
- Buyers take these, at a price that rises with every sale.
- 206.9M held back
- They go into a trading pool with the SOL the curve raised, when it fills.
SOL on the books × tokens on the books = 32,190,000,000That product stays the same on every trade. A buy adds SOL to one side, so the token side has to shrink to keep the product level, and the tokens it sheds are what the buyer gets. A sale does the reverse. The price at any moment is the SOL side divided by the token side: 30 ÷ 1,073,000,000 at launch, or 0.000000028 SOL a token. Across a billion tokens, that's a market cap of about 28 SOL.
When the curve has sold all 793.1 million of its tokens, about 85 SOL has gone in, the price has risen almost 15 times, and the market cap is about 411 SOL.
Why early buyers get more
The price rises with every token sold, so the same SOL buys less the further the curve gets. The first half of the curve's tokens sells for about 17.6 SOL in total. The second half costs about 67.4 SOL.
| Curve sold | SOL in so far | Market cap | 1 SOL buys |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0% | 0 | 28 SOL | 34.2M tokens |
| 25% | 6.8 | 42 SOL | 22.9M tokens |
| 50% | 17.6 | 70 SOL | 13.8M tokens |
| 75% | 37.3 | 141 SOL | 6.9M tokens |
| 90% | 59.6 | 249 SOL | 3.9M tokens |
| 99% | 81.8 | 389 SOL | 2.5M tokens |
From pump.fun's curve for a coin paired with SOL, with its 1.25% fee. Market cap is the price times 1 billion tokens.
That's the whole appeal, and the whole risk. A buyer at 10% pays a fraction of what a buyer at 90% pays, and can sell back to the curve once later buyers have pushed the price up. A big enough sell slides the price back down the curve, which is how most rug pulls on pump.fun work. But the curve only sets the price. Whether anyone pays it is up to people, and a coin is worth what the next buyer will give for it.
Your own buy moves the price too, and a big one moves it a lot: 25 SOL at the start of the curve lifts the price for everyone after you. That's price impact, and your quote already includes it. What other trades do before yours lands is slippage.
What "bonding curve progress" means
pump.fun shows a progress bar on every coin. It counts tokens sold, not SOL raised. Early tokens are cheap, so the bar races at the start: it reaches 50% after about 17.6 SOL, a fifth of the way to graduation in SOL. The last 10% of the bar takes about 25 SOL on its own.
What happens at graduation
When the last of the 793.1 million tokens sells, the curve is complete. pump.fun moves everything into a PumpSwap pool on its own, in one step: the SOL the curve collected, about 85, and the 206.9 million tokens it held back. It charges 0.015 SOL for the move. From then on, the coin trades in that pool, the way most coins on Solana trade.
The pool runs on the same multiply-two-numbers idea, with real SOL and real tokens on both sides now, and its own fees. The creator never owns the pool, so they can't pull its SOL out.
Fees on the curve
Every trade on the curve pays 1.25% of its size: 0.95% to pump.fun and 0.30% to the coin's creator, as creator rewards. Since October 17, 2026, trades placed in pump.fun's own app pay a 0.45% platform fee on top. pump.fun collects its fees in whatever the coin is paired with, its trading pair: SOL, for most coins.
What a bonding curve does and doesn't protect you from
- There's always a buyer. While the curve runs, you can sell back to it at the curve's price, any time.
- The creator can't take the SOL. It sits in the curve until someone sells tokens back, or graduation moves it to the pool.
- There's no floor. When people sell, the price walks back down the same curve it climbed.
- It doesn't stop a creator selling. A creator who bought at launch holds cheap tokens and can sell them like anyone else. Check how much the creator holds before you buy.
- It doesn't stop copycats. Anyone can launch a coin with the same name on its own curve. That's how vamps work, and only the CA tells them apart.
Every coin on pump.fun rides a curve like this one, so the curve won't make yours stand out. The name, the art and the address will. Get a CA that starts with your word, then launch on pump.fun's curve with one wallet approval. New to launching? Start with how to create a coin on pump.fun.
Questions
What is a bonding curve in simple terms?
A price rule written into a coin: the more tokens have sold, the higher the price of the next one. You buy from the curve and sell back to it, not to another person.
How much SOL does it take to fill the pump.fun bonding curve?
About 85 SOL, for a coin paired with SOL. That buys all 793.1 million tokens the curve sells, and takes the coin's market cap from about 28 SOL to about 411 SOL.
What does bonding curve progress mean on pump.fun?
The share of the curve's 793.1 million tokens sold so far. It counts tokens, not SOL, so it climbs fast at the start: it reaches 50% after about 17.6 SOL.
What happens when a pump.fun coin graduates?
pump.fun moves the curve's SOL and the 206.9 million tokens it held back into a PumpSwap pool, on its own, for 0.015 SOL. The coin keeps trading there.
Can the price go down on a bonding curve?
Yes. Every sale moves the price back down the same curve. A curve promises a price for every trade, not a price that only goes up.
