What a launchpad is
A launchpad lets anyone create a coin in a minute and gives it a first market, without the creator funding a pool.
Words in this lesson
A launchpad is a website where anyone can create a new coin in about a minute, and where that coin's first trades happen. You pick a name, a ticker and a picture, and you press create. No coding, and no money needed to start a market.
Before launchpads, starting a coin was harder, and much more dangerous for buyers. The creator made the token, then put their own money into a trading pool next to it. Because the creator owned that pool, they could pull the money out at any moment and leave buyers with coins nobody could buy. That move is called a rug pull, and it happened all the time.
How pump.fun changed it
pump.fun arrived on Solana in early 2024 with a simpler idea. A new coin does not start in a pool the creator controls. It starts on a bonding curve: a price rule written into the launchpad's code. Buyers send SOL to the curve and get coins back. Sellers hand coins back and get SOL. Nobody has to put up money on day one, and the creator cannot pull the curve's SOL, because it is not theirs.
When enough SOL has gone into the curve, the coin graduates. Its SOL and its remaining coins move into a normal trading pool. pump.fun locks that pool for good, so nobody can withdraw its money the way the old rug pulls did. That does not make the coin safe. Holders can still sell their coins into the pool, every sale takes SOL out and pushes the price down, and a few big sellers can empty much of it quickly. The graduation lesson shows how far one sale can move the price. Other launchpads set their own rules here, which a later lesson covers.
The four stages
- Create. Someone fills in a name, ticker and picture. On pump.fun this has no platform fee, only Solana's small network costs.
- Bonding curve. Everyone trades against the curve. The price goes up as people buy and down as they sell.
- Graduation. The curve fills up and the coin moves into a trading pool. On pump.fun that pool is on PumpSwap, pump.fun's own exchange.
- Open market. The coin now trades like any other token. Trading apps, chart sites and swap apps all see it.
Who runs launchpads today
pump.fun is by far the biggest. The data firm Bitquery counted about 11.5 million new Solana tokens between November 2025 and early October 2026, and 78% of them were made on pump.fun. Meteora's launch tool made about 10% and Raydium's LaunchLab about 4%. Smaller launchpads share the rest, and a later lesson in this track walks through them.
The honest odds
A launchpad makes creating a coin almost free, so millions get created. Almost all of them die fast.
| What happened to pump.fun coins | How many |
|---|---|
| Graduated to a pool | About 1 in 58 |
| Never traded again after launch day | 79% |
| Last trade came within about 3 minutes of launch | About half |
| Still had 10 or more trades in their fifth week | About 1 in 437 |
What 1 in 58 means for you
Say you buy the first 58 brand new coins you see, 0.1 SOL each. That is 5.8 SOL spent. On these odds, about one of them reaches graduation. Most of the other 57 stop trading on their first day, many within minutes, and selling them often gets back only a small part of what you paid. Graduating is not even profit, because plenty of coins graduate and then fall. To come out ahead, that one coin has to grow enough to pay for 57 losses.
Next we open up the bonding curve and look at the real numbers: what a coin costs at the start, what it costs at the end, and why the first buyers get so much more for their SOL.
Next: the bonding curve, step by stepCheck what you learned
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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.