Bonding curve
A bonding curve is a pricing formula that sets a token's price from how many tokens have already been bought, with the launch contract itself acting as the seller. On Pump.fun, every new coin starts on a curve, so it is tradeable instantly without anyone seeding a liquidity pool.
How a bonding curve works
Instead of matching buyers with sellers, a bonding curve contract holds the token supply and quotes a price from a formula. Each buy pushes the price up a little and each sell pushes it back down. The earliest buyers pay the lowest prices, and every later buyer pays more.
Pump.fun's public program docs say its curve is based on the Uniswap V2 constant-product formula and uses synthetic, or virtual, reserves so there is liquidity from the first trade. The default parameters published in those docs are a total supply of 1 billion tokens, of which about 793.1 million are sold through the curve, starting against 30 SOL of virtual reserves. These values are read from the program's global settings and can change.
What happens when the curve fills
According to the same docs, the curve is marked complete at the end of the buy that leaves no real tokens on it. After that, trading on the curve stops and the liquidity is migrated to a PumpSwap pool, which Pump.fun calls graduating. Most tokens never get there.
Fees on the Pump.fun curve
Pump.fun's fees page lists a 1.25% total fee on bonding-curve trades: 0.30% to the coin's creator, 0.95% to the protocol and 0% to liquidity providers. From 2026-10-17, trades placed through the pump.fun web or mobile app also carry a 0.45% Platform Fee, or 0.40% for a wallet that has applied a referral code. The Platform Fee does not apply on Pump.fun's Terminal or third-party interfaces, but those interfaces usually charge their own fee on top of the protocol fees.
What it means before you trade
Jupiter's risk documentation notes that a token still on a bonding curve has limited liquidity and that price impact per trade can be much higher than on an established pool. A buy of a fixed SOL amount gets fewer tokens the further the curve has progressed, and selling a large position back into a thin curve can move the price sharply against you.
The bonding-curve percentage shown by trading apps tells you how much of the curve has been filled, not how healthy the token is. Pump.fun shows market cap as price times 1 billion tokens, so it reflects the whole supply rather than money you could actually sell into. Check holder concentration and early bundled buys before treating a fast-filling curve as demand.
Where this shows up
- pump.fun — Creators launching a memecoin in one click, and traders buying early on the bonding curve before graduation.
- PumpSwap — Traders of pump.fun coins after graduation, and LPs in those pools.
- Bonk.fun — Solana memecoin creators and traders who want BONK-ecosystem launches on Raydium LaunchLab rails.
- Moonshot — Mobile-first buyers who want to fund with card or Apple Pay and trade Solana memecoins in a simple app.
- Four.meme — BNB Chain memecoin creators and traders who want PancakeSwap graduation and pairs beyond BNB.
- Jupiter — Solana traders who want aggregated routing across DEXes with low or zero fees on major and stable pairs.
Sources
Last checked . Fees and terms change often; the venue's own page wins if it disagrees with ours.
- Pump program README (pump.fun public docs) — checked 2026-10-16
- pump.fun Fees — checked 2026-10-16
- Risks and Limitations, Jupiter Spot (Jupiter docs) — checked 2026-10-16
- Pump.fun token graduation rate jumps after BOOST changes launch incentives (The Block, 2026-07-29) — checked 2026-10-16