Curriculum·J302 Swap Execution: AMMs, MEV, and DEX Architectures·about 33 min
Launch venues and bonding curves
By the end of this lesson you can
- →Explain how a bonding curve prices without a counterparty or any liquidity
- →Compute the base rate at which launches complete their curve
- →Show why your entry price is a position in a queue rather than a valuation
- →State what completing a curve does and does not establish
Junior · enrolled learners
This lesson opens with The completion rate on a launch venue.
- What happened
- Pump.fun issues tokens against a bonding curve, which prices purchases as a deterministic function of how much has already been bought and requires no initial liquidity and no other trader on the other side. A token completes its curve when roughly 85 SOL of net purchases have accumulated, at which point it graduates to a conventional pool, initially Raydium and, after the launch of PumpSwap on 20 March 2025, that venue. On 25 February 2025 only 0.72 percent of that day's launches completed, the lowest daily rate since 17 May 2024, and a study of all 655,770 tokens created on the venue from 1 September to 1 October 2025 found 4,338 graduated, about 0.63 percent. Launch volumes were large and volatile, falling 51.1 percent in two weeks from 54,368 daily launches on 11 February to 26,584 on 25 February 2025.
- The decision point
- The bonding curve solved a genuine problem, which is that a new asset has no market and therefore no price, by making price a function of cumulative purchases instead. What that produces is a venue where roughly one launch in a hundred and forty reaches a conventional pool, and where reaching one is not success but the first moment a market exists at all. Every buyer before that point holds a position whose price was set by their place in a queue.
What you will be able to answer
- →How does a bonding curve price?
- →What is the completion base rate?
- →What determines your entry price on a curve?
- →What does completing a curve establish?
Orientation and Year One are open: anyone can read them without an account. From Year Two onward the lessons are for enrolled learners, because progress through the later years only means anything if it is tracked against a record.
It is free. We do not sell the list and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Sources and review
- https://solanafloor.com/news/token-graduation-rate-hits-lowest-point-since-may-2024-pumpfun-doomed
- https://crypto.news/how-meme-coins-are-made-bonding-curves-pump-fun-rug-pulls/
- https://docs.chainstack.com/docs/solana-listening-to-pumpfun-migrations-to-raydium
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14860
Confidence medium·Volatility high·Reviewed 2026-08-06·Owner unassigned
Contested
Marked medium confidence and high volatility because launch volumes, completion rates and the destination venue for graduations have all changed repeatedly and will change again. The completion threshold and the destination in particular are parameters the operator sets. The mechanism and the order of magnitude of the base rate are the durable parts.
Completion rates depend on the window and the method. SolanaFloor's 0.72 percent is a single day's launches; the 0.63 percent is Marino, Naviglio, Tarantelli and Lillo's count over September 2025 (arXiv 2602.14860, a preprint), which also gives the 85 SOL threshold, about $69,000 of market capitalization at the time; crypto.news says fewer than two percent ever graduate. All of them put the rate in low single figures per hundred or below, which is the part the lesson relies on.
Some descriptions of bonding curves, including the crypto.news explainer cited here, say the contract mints on buy and burns on sell. On Pump.fun the supply of one billion tokens is minted at launch, about 793 million are allocated to the curve, and purchases withdraw tokens from it, per the arXiv study. The pricing argument is the same either way.
J306-04 owns the rug taxonomy and the base rate of scam issuance. This lesson covers the launch venue as an architecture and what a bonding curve does to price formation. Keep the split and do not re-derive the rug mechanisms here.