A Solana memecoin is a token whose price runs on attention and community, not on any business behind it, and pump.fun is the website where most of them are born. Anyone can mint a new coin there in about a minute, an automated pricing curve gives it a market instantly, and trading starts for pennies in fees.
The scale backs that up. A Solana transaction costs a tiny fraction of a cent, and blocks arrive roughly every four tenths of a second. That makes launching and trading thousands of coins a day affordable. At the late-2024 peak, roughly seven in ten of all new tokens minted across what Solana is as a network came through pump.fun, at a pace near seven new tokens per minute (source: an academic study of Solana memecoin activity). Millions of coins have been created this way since January 2024.
That is the honest tension running through everything below: the machine is genuinely open to everyone, and the odds are genuinely stacked.
Why the memecoin crowd settled on Solana
Memecoins concentrated on Solana because the chain made speculation cheap and instant. The base transaction fee is 0.000005 SOL, about four hundredths of a cent. That means a trader can fire dozens of small buys and sells without fees eating the position. On a chain where one trade costs dollars, memecoin culture simply cannot breathe.
Speed matters just as much as price. Solana confirms transactions in seconds because of how it processes transactions in parallel rather than single file. The base fee is a protocol constant rather than an auction (source: Solana's core fee documentation). The full price list lives in our guide to Solana's fees.
The culture arrived in waves. BONK started it in December 2022, airdropping half its supply to Solana users at the chain's lowest moment and turning into the community's mascot (source: Blockchain Council's BONK explainer). Dogwifhat, a photo of a dog in a knitted hat, followed in late 2023 and reached a market value in the billions. Then in January 2025, the sitting US president launched the TRUMP coin on Solana, and SOL itself jumped about 12% on the launch weekend (source: CNBC's TRUMP-coin launch coverage). The pattern was set: when a memecoin moment happens, it happens on Solana, usually inside a wallet like Phantom. If you want to watch the culture up close, setting up Phantom takes minutes.
A culture that size needed a factory, and in January 2024 it got one.
What pump.fun actually does
Pump.fun is a launchpad: a site that turns token creation into a one-minute form. You pick a name, a ticker, and an image, and the site mints the coin and opens trading immediately. No code, no liquidity to raise, no listing approval. The first buyer's purchase covers a creation cost of roughly $2 worth of SOL (source: CoinGecko's pump.fun guide).
Every launch follows the same template. The coin is a standard Solana token, the same format described in Blofin's guide to SPL and Token-2022 tokens. The supply is fixed at one billion. There is no presale and no reserved team allocation; everyone, including the creator, buys from the same public curve. Around 800 million of the billion tokens are available through that curve, with the rest set aside to seed the coin's future trading pool.
Pump.fun calls this a fair launch, meaning everyone faces the same starting price. It does not mean everyone has the same chance. A creator can buy their own coin the second it goes live and sell into the first wave of buyers. Automated bots do exactly that on popular launches. The launch is fair the way a casino floor is fair: the rules are the same for everyone, and the house still has an edge.
The interesting machinery is the thing setting the price, and it deserves its own two minutes.
The bonding curve: how a brand-new coin gets a price
New pump.fun coins trade on a bonding curve: a formula that sets the price from how many tokens have been bought so far. Every buy pushes the price up a notch along the curve, every sell pushes it back down, and a 1% fee comes out of each trade. No order book, no market maker, no negotiation.
Think of it as a vending machine that raises the price with every can it sells and refunds along the same schedule. The machine always quotes you a price, which is why a coin created 30 seconds ago is instantly tradable. Liquidity, the pool of money that lets you exit, is whatever earlier buyers have paid in, sitting inside the curve's contract.
The math is what makes early entry so tempting. Suppose you put $50 into a brand-new coin while its total market value is around $6,000. Now say the coin catches a wave of attention and climbs toward graduation at roughly $69,000. The curve has multiplied the price roughly tenfold along the way, and your $50 is worth a few hundred dollars on paper. The buyer who arrives near the top pays about ten times your price for the same tokens. Both of you paid the posted price; the curve simply rewards being early.
Now run it backward, because the curve is symmetric. When attention leaves, every sell walks the price back down the same slope, and the last buyers absorb nearly the whole loss. Most coins never catch a wave at all. They get a handful of trades and go quiet within the hour, with the $50 simply stuck in a dead token nobody will buy back.
The curve has a finish line, though, and crossing it changes what the coin is.
Graduation: when a memecoin leaves the nursery
When buying pushes a coin's market value to roughly $69,000, which takes about 85 SOL of net buying, the coin graduates. It leaves the bonding curve and becomes a normal token trading in a liquidity pool. Since March 2025 that pool is created automatically and free on PumpSwap, pump.fun's own exchange (source: Blocmates' PumpSwap launch report).
Much of what you will read online gets that destination wrong. Before March 2025, graduates moved to Raydium, an independent Solana exchange, and pump.fun paid a 6 SOL migration fee each time. Today a pump.fun graduate lands on PumpSwap, while Raydium remains the graduation home for the rival LetsBonk launchpad. Once graduated, the coin trades like any other Solana token, in a pool of paired tokens. The pool mechanics are covered in Blofin's guide to Raydium's liquidity pools, and the venues in our roundup of Solana DEXes for beginners.
| On the bonding curve | After graduation | |
|---|---|---|
| Price set by | A fixed formula | Supply and demand in a pool |
| Where it trades | Only on pump.fun | PumpSwap and any Solana DEX |
| Liquidity | Whatever the curve has collected | A seeded pool (deposited at graduation) |
| Can it hit zero bids? | Price walks down the curve as sellers exit | Pool can be drained by mass selling |
| Share of coins that get here | Everything starts here | Fewer than 2% ever arrive |
Graduation is a liquidity milestone, not a safety certificate. Fewer than 2% of pump.fun coins ever reach it, per the academic study cited earlier, and a graduated coin can still lose most of its value in an afternoon. What graduation does signal is survival of the first filter.
Pump.fun no longer runs this game alone, and the competition explains a lot about how the machine keeps evolving.
LetsBonk and the launchpad race
LetsBonk is pump.fun's strongest challenger: a launchpad built in April 2025 by the BONK community on Raydium's LaunchLab framework. The mechanics rhyme with pump.fun's: a bonding curve, a roughly $69,000 graduation line, and a 1% trading fee. The differences: graduates list on Raydium, and a large slice of platform fees buys BONK on the open market and permanently destroys it.
The burn loop gives LetsBonk a community pitch pump.fun never had. It worked: in July 2025 LetsBonk briefly overtook pump.fun in daily launches, a lead pump.fun soon clawed back (source: The Block's launchpad coverage). Heading through mid-2026, pump.fun handles most launchpad activity, with LetsBonk holding the clearest second place.
| pump.fun | LetsBonk | |
|---|---|---|
| Launched | January 2024 | April 2025 |
| Built by | Independent team | BONK community, on Raydium LaunchLab |
| Graduation destination | PumpSwap (its own DEX) | Raydium |
| Trading fee on the curve | 1% | 1% |
| Where fees go | Platform revenue; buybacks of its PUMP token | Platform costs plus BONK buy-and-burn |
| Position in mid-2026 | Most launches and volume | Strongest challenger |
Notice what both sides are competing for, though. Every coin launched, on either platform, pays the house. In January 2026, PumpSwap set a record of about $1.2 billion traded in a single day (source: CoinDesk's PumpSwap volume report). That frenzy was a record for the platform's fee take too.
Which brings us to the part most explainers whisper and this one will say plainly.
The honest odds: who actually makes money
Most memecoin buyers lose money, and the data is not close. Research firm Solidus Labs examined pump.fun tokens launched before April 2025 that had at least five trades. It found 98.6% collapsed below $1,000 in remaining liquidity, the signature of a pump-and-dump that left late buyers holding nothing (source: Solidus Labs' Solana rug-pull research).
Read that stat carefully, because it is a measured cohort, not a slogan. Out of more than seven million tokens in the study window, only about 97,000 kept even $1,000 of liquidity. Pair it with the graduation odds from the last section and the shape of the game is clear. A memecoin purchase is a lottery ticket where the jackpot is real, the winners are loudly visible, and the base rate is brutal.
Meanwhile the house does fine in every weather. Pump.fun has collected on the order of $800 million in lifetime fees. In July 2025 it sold its own PUMP token in a sale that raised $600 million in about twelve minutes, roughly $1.3 billion including private buyers (source: Wikipedia's pump.fun entry). Creators of viral coins earn fee shares. Bots that snipe launches earn the early slots. The consistent winners in memecoin markets are the ones paid per transaction, not per prediction.
From Blofin's operational perspective, memecoin frenzies show up in exchange flows before they show up in headlines. SOL deposit and withdrawal traffic surges within hours of a hot launch, and it fades just as quickly once the curve empties. The pattern we observe is spike-shaped, not staircase-shaped, which is exactly what a market running on attention rather than fundamentals should look like.
That does not mean never touch one. It means open eyes and small numbers.
If you still want to buy one: ground rules
Treat memecoin money as entertainment budget: an amount whose total loss would annoy you no more than a concert ticket. For most people that is $20 to $100, not a rent payment. Decide the number before you look at any chart, because the charts are engineered, socially and mechanically, to make you raise it.
Three practical basics follow from how the machine works. First, you will need SOL in a self-custody wallet to play at all, so start with buying SOL on an exchange and withdrawing it. Second, remember every trade pays fees in SOL, so keep a small buffer beyond your stake. Third, if a coin you hold graduates, you will likely trade it through an aggregator. Swapping on Jupiter has its own settings worth learning before money is on the line.
The skill that actually protects you is telling an ordinary failed coin from a deliberate trap, and that topic is big enough to own its own guide. Blofin's walkthrough of spotting memecoin rug pulls covers the red flags, the holder checks, and the exit mechanics. Read it before your first buy, not after.
The machinery is clever and the odds are bad. Hold both thoughts, and the rest is a budgeting decision.
Frequently asked questions
Is pump.fun itself safe to use?
The site's contracts have processed millions of launches without the platform itself stealing funds, so the mechanical risk sits in the tokens, not the venue. Legal risk is another matter. Pump.fun blocked UK users in December 2024 after a Financial Conduct Authority warning, and it faces ongoing class-action litigation in the US over whether its tokens were unregistered securities. The litigation does not directly endanger your wallet, but it can change how the site operates in your country.
What is the PUMP token?
PUMP is pump.fun's own token, sold in July 2025 in one of crypto's largest launches. It is entirely separate from the coins created on the site. Buying PUMP is a bet on the launchpad's fee business, a bit like buying shares in the casino instead of chips at its tables. It carries its own volatility: the token has traded far below its 2025 peak, and its vesting schedule keeps releasing new supply for years.
Can a graduated memecoin still go to zero?
Yes. Graduation moves a coin into a real liquidity pool. But the pool only holds what was deposited and what traders add, and mass selling can drain it. The TRUMP coin illustrates the ceiling and the floor: it reached a market value in the tens of billions within days, then gave up most of it within months. Graduation filters out the coins nobody wanted; it says nothing about what the crowd does next.
What does it cost to launch a coin on pump.fun?
Almost nothing, which is the point. Creating the token costs roughly $2 worth of SOL, folded into the first purchase. The platform earns through the 1% fee on every bonding-curve trade instead. That pricing explains the volume: at near-zero cost, people launch coins as jokes, as experiments, and as spam.
Do any Solana memecoins actually last?
A few have. BONK has survived since 2022 and grew into a community with its own launchpad, and dogwifhat has held a large market value for years. They are the exceptions that define the category's ceiling, not its average. A memecoin lasts only as long as people keep choosing to care about it. The survivors are the ones that turned holders into a durable community.
Researched and written by the Blofin Academy editorial team with AI-assisted drafting. Primary sources include Solana's core fee documentation, an academic study of Solana memecoin activity, CoinGecko's pump.fun guide, Blocmates' PumpSwap launch report, Solidus Labs' Solana rug-pull research, Blockchain Council's BONK explainer, The Block's launchpad coverage, CNBC's TRUMP-coin launch coverage, CoinDesk's PumpSwap volume report, and Wikipedia's pump.fun entry. All facts independently verified against cited documentation current as of July 2026.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice, investment guidance, or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any digital asset. Cryptocurrency markets involve significant risk and you should conduct your own research and consult qualified professionals before making investment decisions. Blofin Academy content reflects the state of public information at time of publication; protocol parameters, fees, and ecosystem data change frequently.