What is Pump.fun and how does it work?

Pump.fun is a crypto launchpad on Solana built for meme coins. Anyone can create a token, and it becomes tradable right away without the creator having to supply starting liquidity. The Block reports it launched in January 2024.

What is Pump.fun and how does it work?

When someone creates a coin, Pump.fun sets up a fixed supply and a bonding curve account for it. Buyers pay in SOL and receive tokens from the curve, and sellers return tokens for SOL. No order book or market maker is needed, because the smart contract quotes every price.

Pump.fun is mainly used to launch and trade memecoins, at very high volume. The Block counted about 11,500 new coins on Pump.fun in a single day in July 2025. Because anyone can launch a coin and there is no vetting, a listing says nothing about who is behind a token or whether it has any purpose, so it helps to understand what a rug pull is.

What is the Pump.fun bonding curve?

A bonding curve is a formula that sets a token's price based on how much has been bought. Pump.fun's documentation says it uses a Uniswap V2 style formula with "virtual" reserves. Each buy adds SOL and removes tokens, pushing the price up, and each sell does the reverse.

According to Bitquery, about 800 million of each coin's 1 billion tokens are sold through the curve, with about 200 million held back. When all the curve's tokens are bought, the coin "graduates." The docs describe this as reaching a set market cap, with the exact figure depending on SOL's price and fee settings, which have changed over time.

What is the Pump.fun AMM?

Graduated coins used to move to the Raydium exchange, which carried a 6 SOL migration fee. On March 20, 2025, Pump.fun launched PumpSwap, its own automated market maker, and coins now migrate there automatically for free. PumpSwap is a constant-product AMM, the same basic design described in our liquidity pool guide. The liquidity pool tokens created at graduation are burned, so that starting liquidity cannot be withdrawn.

At launch, The Block reported a 0.25% fee per PumpSwap trade, with 0.2% going to liquidity providers and 0.05% to the protocol. Pump.fun has since moved to dynamic fees that vary with a coin's market cap, and coin creators can now collect a share of fees on both the bonding curve and PumpSwap.

What is the Pump.fun token?

PUMP is Pump.fun's own token. DL News reported that its public sale, held in July 2025, sold 125 billion PUMP at $0.004 each, raising about $500 million in 12 minutes.

Competition has been intense. In early July 2025, The Block reported that LetsBONK, a rival Solana launchpad, briefly overtook Pump.fun in daily token launches, though Pump.fun still had more than twice as many active traders.