Skip to content
Trenchpilot
Get started
BeginnerLesson 2 of 6 · 4 min read

The bonding curve, step by step

How pump.fun's curve sets the price of a new coin, with the real numbers, and why the first buyers get so many more coins.

On this page
  1. The pump.fun numbers
  2. What the price does along the way
  3. Selling into the curve
  4. Fees on the curve
  5. Quiz

A bonding curve is a price rule. It says: the more coins have already been bought, the higher the price of the next one. There is no order book (the list of buy and sell offers that an exchange like Bybit matches up) and no person selling to you. You trade with the curve itself, and the price depends only on how much has been bought so far, not on who you are.

The pump.fun numbers

Most pump.fun coins are bought and sold with SOL; traders call them SOL-paired. A creator can also pair a coin with USDC, a dollar stablecoin, and those coins start from different numbers. Every normal SOL-paired coin starts the same way (Mayhem mode coins, which start with 2 billion tokens, are the exception). These numbers come from pump.fun's public program documents.

  • Total supply: 1,000,000,000 coins. The creator gets no free share and has no button to print more.
  • For sale on the curve: 793.1 million coins, about 79% of the supply.
  • Held back: the other 206.9 million coins wait for graduation, when they go into the trading pool.
  • To fill the curve: buyers put in about 85 SOL in total, before fees.

The curve starts as if it already held 30 SOL on one side and 1.073 billion coins on the other. These are called virtual reserves. They are not real money. They only set the first price and the shape of the curve. Every buy adds real SOL to one side and takes coins out of the other, and the price is the ratio between the two sides.

How a bonding curve prices a new coinA line chart. The price starts tiny at launch and climbs faster and faster as more coins are bought from the curve, so early buyers pay little and late buyers pay a lot. When the curve sells out the coin graduates, marked by a dashed line. After that it trades in a pool, where the price moves up and down with buyers and sellers.PriceMore coins bought from the curvePoolEarly buyers pay littleLate buyers pay a lotGraduationIn the poolprice movesboth ways
Price climbs slowly at first, then faster as the curve fills. Selling walks it back down the same line.

What the price does along the way

SOL put into the curveCoins sold so farMarket cap
0 (the start)0About 28 SOL
10 SOL268 millionAbout 50 SOL
20 SOL429 millionAbout 78 SOL
40 SOL613 millionAbout 152 SOL
60 SOL715 millionAbout 252 SOL
85 SOL (graduation)793 millionAbout 411 SOL
Worked out from pump.fun's published curve settings, before fees. Market cap is the price of one coin times 1 billion.

Look at the first two rows. The first 10 SOL buys 268 million coins, more than a quarter of the whole supply. The last 25 SOL, from 60 to 85, buys only about 78 million. From the first buy to graduation, the price rises about 14.7 times.

In dollars, it depends on the price of SOL. At $100 per SOL, the round number this guide uses, a fresh coin starts near $2,800 market cap and graduates near $41,000. For today's figure, multiply the SOL price by about 28 for the start and about 411 for graduation, or check the coin's own page.

Illustration of a bonding curve, with the price rising as more coins are bought
Same curve, same rule, for every buyer. Only the timing differs.
Example

Same 1 SOL, very different results

Two people each spend 1 SOL on the same coin. After the 1.25% curve fee, about 0.9875 SOL goes into the curve.

  1. Step 1: Ana buys first, when the curve is empty. She gets about 34.2 million coins.
  2. Step 2: Ben buys later, when 40 SOL is already in the curve. He gets about 6.4 million coins, less than a fifth of Ana's.
  3. Step 3: If the coin reaches graduation, Ana's coins are worth about 14 SOL on paper and Ben's about 2.6 SOL.
  4. Step 4: On paper is the key phrase. Selling 34 million coins pushes the price down as you sell, and most coins never graduate at all.

This is why the first seconds of a launch are a fight. Bots called snipers try to buy in the same instant a coin is created. Some creators buy from many wallets at once, which is called bundling. Both are ways to grab the cheap part of the curve before you can.

Selling into the curve

You can sell back to the curve at any time before graduation. You hand back coins, you take SOL out, and the price slides back down the same line.

Here is the part beginners miss. The SOL in the curve is only the SOL that buyers put in. When you sell for a profit, that profit is paid by people who bought after you. If everyone heads for the exit, the last sellers get almost nothing, because the curve has almost nothing left to give.

Fees on the curve

Every buy and every sell on a pump.fun curve pays 1.25%: 0.95% to pump.fun and 0.30% to the coin's creator, according to pump.fun's fee page dated 17 October 2026. Buying and then selling costs you about 2.5% before Solana network fees, even if the price never moves. Trading in the pump.fun website or app adds a separate platform fee on top.

Fees, creator rewards and cashback

Check what you learned

0 of 5 answered

  1. Question 1On a pump.fun curve, which buy gets the most coins for 1 SOL?
  2. Question 2TrickyYou sell on the curve for a profit. Where does that SOL come from?
  3. Question 3What are the virtual reserves on a pump.fun curve?
  4. Question 4How many of a normal pump.fun coin's 1 billion coins are sold on the curve?
  5. Question 5You buy and then sell a coin on a pump.fun curve, and the price did not move at all. Roughly what did the curve fees cost you?

Finished reading? Tick it off and your progress is kept in this browser.

This guide is for learning. It is not financial advice. Most memecoins go to zero and most people who trade them lose money. Only ever trade what you can afford to lose.