Pump.fun

Pump.fun is a memecoin launchpad and trading app on Solana. Anyone can make a new coin in seconds. You fill in a name, a ticker and a picture. You need no code and no cash to start a market. The coin trades at once on a bonding curve, a price formula that goes up with every buy. If enough people buy, the coin "graduates" to PumpSwap, Pump.fun's own exchange. Very few coins get that far. Pump.fun went live in January 2024. Its Pumpfun app has since added futures trading and coins from other chains.

How does Pump.fun work? The bonding curve and graduation

Every Pump.fun coin is sold from a bonding curve: a contract that holds the coin's supply and sets its price by formula. Each buy pushes the price up and each sell pushes it down, so there is always a price and someone to trade with. Pump.fun's program documentation gives every coin the same supply of one billion tokens.

When the curve sells out, the coin graduates. Its liquidity moves into a PumpSwap pool, where it trades like any other token. Migration is permissionless: anyone can trigger it once a curve is complete. The docs say the LP tokens from the new pool are then burned, so nobody can pull that starting liquidity out.

The docs list the curve's starting values:

The curve is a constant-product formula, so you can work out what graduation takes. By our arithmetic from those starting values, buying every curve token takes about 85 SOL, before fees. The last price then values the full supply at about 410 SOL. That is why the dollar figure quoted for graduation moves with the SOL price. Pump.fun's admin key can change these settings, so treat the figures as a guide.

Graduation is rare. In June 2026 we covered a day when 42,000 tokens launched on Pump.fun. A Dune dashboard that tracks the platform puts the all-time graduation rate below 2%. For most coins, the bonding curve is the whole life of the token, and that is where most trading and most losses happen.

How to create a coin on Pump.fun, and what it costs

Launching a coin on Pump.fun takes one form: name, ticker, image and an optional description, then a wallet signature. There is no creation fee beyond Solana's network fee, and the coin trades the moment it exists.

Trading costs more than launching. In October 2026, Crypto Briefing reported a combined fee of about 1.25% on bonding curve trades. Of that, 0.30% goes to the coin's creator and the rest to the protocol.

After graduation, PumpSwap fees step down as a coin's market cap grows. Pump.fun brought in this sliding scale in September 2025, under a plan it called Project Ascend, and part of the fee goes to the coin's creator (Decrypt).

Since September 2026, creators choose between two fee models when they launch. A standard coin sends creator fees to the creator's wallet. A Holder Rewards coin pays those fees out to holders instead, several times an hour, according to Crypto Briefing. The choice is permanent. Holder Rewards replaced an earlier Cashback mode, which can no longer be picked for new coins.

PumpSwap: the Pump.fun DEX for graduated coins

PumpSwap is Pump.fun's own exchange. It is where coins go when their bonding curve fills. It went live on 20 March 2025. Before that, coins moved to Raydium RAY$1.65-4.9% pools, and each move cost a fee. Moves to PumpSwap are free and instant. So Pump.fun now keeps the trade in its best coins on its own exchange.

PumpSwap pools price trades with the same "x times y" formula many Solana exchanges use, per the PumpSwap docs. The public docs show builders how to trade the pools directly. One trade can also hop through several pools at once.

The Pumpfun app: callout rewards, holder rewards, perps and other chains

The Pumpfun app is where you trade Pump.fun coins on your phone or the web. It has a social feed where traders "call out" coins they like. The app pays people for good calls and for bringing in new users. It now also offers futures and coins from other chains, all paid from one USDC balance.

Callout Rewards started in August 2026. They pay traders in USDC each day for calling coins. From 10 October 2026, the pay depends on whether followers made money on the call. Calls on very small coins earn less (Crypto Briefing).

Since mid-October 2026 the app adds a 0.45% platform fee to each trade, and referred users get a discount, Crypto Briefing reported. Cohen says Pump.fun pays all of that fee back out to people who refer traders or call out coins. On 30 October, co-founder Alon Cohen announced a Creator Program that pays TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and X creators for bringing in traders.

Perps, or perpetual futures, let you bet on a price going up or down with borrowed money. Pump.fun announced perps live in the app on 28 October 2026, covering crypto, stocks and commodities. Orders go to Hyperliquid, a separate exchange, which matches them and runs liquidations. Bankless reported that perps are not offered in the US or Ontario.

The same week, the app added tokens on TON, Arbitrum and Polygon, each bought from the USDC balance without bridging. Hyperliquid's HyperEVM coins came in August 2026, per Bankless.

Pump.fun Terminal and Kolscan

Terminal is Pump.fun's trading screen for people who trade a lot. Pump.fun got it in October 2025 by buying Padre, a trading app that worked on Solana, Ethereum, BNB Chain and Base (Cointelegraph). Padre renamed itself Terminal soon after. Terminal's revenue now feeds the PUMP buyback.

Pump.fun's first purchase, in July 2025, was Kolscan. It tracks well-known traders' wallets, ranks them by profit and lets users copy their trades.

PUMP token: ICO, buybacks and burns

PUMP is Pump.fun's own token. Its public sale ran in July 2025, and with private sales it raised about $1.3 billion (Fortune). Its main use is a buyback: Pump.fun spends part of what it earns buying PUMP and destroying it. That shrinks the supply over time.

The buyback has changed. For about nine months Pump.fun put all of its revenue into buying PUMP, CoinDesk reported. On 28 April 2026 it burned the tokens it had bought, worth about $370 million and 36% of the PUMP in circulation (The Block).

Pump.fun then cut the buyback to half of its net revenue from the bonding curve, PumpSwap and Terminal. A locked contract buys and burns the tokens on its own for one year. The other half funds the business. Cohen told The Block a large treasury lets Pump.fun "make big bets over the next 5-10 years."

The token widget on this page shows PUMP's live price. Our Lightspeed coverage broke down the PUMP launch at the time.

Is Pump.fun safe? Audits, exploits and risks

The coins on Pump.fun are some of the riskiest things you can buy in crypto. Very few graduate, and nobody checks a coin's name or maker before it goes live. Copycat coins that borrow a famous name are common. Only put in money you could lose in full.

The platform has risks of its own. When PumpSwap launched, Pump.fun said it had passed nine security audits and ran a $2 million audit contest, Decrypt reported. Pump.fun did not name the auditors, and we found no published audit report for the Pump program or PumpSwap in its docs. The docs describe an admin key that can change fees, fee recipients and other settings. We could not confirm whether one key or a group of signers can upgrade the programs' code.

In May 2024 an attacker drained about $2 million from bonding curves (The Block). Decrypt later described the thief as a former employee. Pump.fun paused trading and fixed its contracts, and coins already on Raydium were safe. In February 2025 attackers took over Pump.fun's X account and pushed a fake PUMP token (The Block). Check big announcements on more than one official channel.

Who holds your money depends on how you trade. On the website you trade from your own Solana wallet. The app's USDC balance, other chains and perps add more parts that can fail, such as cross-chain transfers and Hyperliquid itself.

Is Pump.fun legal? Lawsuits and blocked countries

Pump.fun is blocked in some places. In December 2024 the UK's money watchdog, the FCA, warned that Pump.fun had no right to work there. Pump.fun shut out UK users three days later (Decrypt). Perps are also not on offer in the US or Ontario.

Pump.fun also faces a lawsuit in New York. Traders are suing Baton Corporation, the firm behind Pump.fun, and its three founders. On 31 August 2026 Judge Colleen McMahon threw out the claim that two coins named in the case were securities. She also dropped every claim against Solana Labs and the Solana Foundation (court opinion; our coverage). But claims of racketeering against the firm and its founders go on, so the case is still open.

Is Pump.fun worth using? Who it suits

Pump.fun suits two groups. One is memecoin traders who want the newest coins first and accept that most will go to zero. The other is creators who want a free, instant launch with a market already built in, and are happy for their coin to live or die on attention.

It suits you less if you want control of your token. On Pump.fun the supply, curve and graduation rules are fixed by the platform, and you don't hold a mint authority you can manage. It is also a poor fit if you are new and treating it as an investment, given how few coins survive the curve. Before trading, check whether Pump.fun and its perps are available where you live.

Pump.fun alternatives: Bonk.fun, Raydium and launching your own token

The closest alternatives are other Solana launchpads. Bonk.fun, from the Bonk community, sends graduated coins to Raydium. It briefly passed Pump.fun in launches in July 2025, as our podcast coverage of the Solana launchpad wars explains. It is much smaller now, as our report on Bonk's Q3 2026 results shows. DEX Screener's Moonshot is another choice. For trading, the Pumpfun app competes with apps like Fomo, and Terminal with tools like Axiom.

You may want to own your coin outright instead of launching on a curve. Solana Compass has a tool to make an SPL token from your own wallet. To be clear, we built and run it, and its fees go to compassSOL stakers. It makes a standard Solana token with a name and logo. You can give up the right to mint more or freeze accounts. You can also open and lock a Meteora trading pool at a price you pick. The catch is that you bring the money and the buyers yourself. There is no feed or curve to help people find your coin.

Who owns Pump.fun? Founders and history

Three founders from England started Pump.fun: Noah Tweedale, Alon Cohen and Dylan Kerler. Their firm, Baton Corporation, runs it. The site went live on Solana in January 2024 (Wikipedia). Cohen is the one you will see most. He often posts the big news on X himself.

Here is what has happened since it went live: