Launch venues and bonding curves

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 or counterparty. 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. Reported completion rates have run in the region of 0.7 to 0.8 percent of launches through 2025, reaching 0.72 percent on 25 February 2025, described at the time as the lowest since May 2024, and recovering above 1 percent subsequently. Launch volumes over the same period 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.

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