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Graduation, and what the lock means for you

At graduation the SOL leaves our program. It goes into an ordinary pool on Meteora, or on Raydium as a fallback, and the liquidity is locked forever: nobody can pull it, the chef and us included.

When it happens(link to this section)

A coin graduates the moment its curve inventory is bought out. There is no vote, no timer and no discretion: the buy that takes the last token is charged exactly the cost of the tokens it took, not the whole amount it offered, and the coin's status moves on.

Between the curve and the pool(link to this section)

Trading pauses between the moment the curve sells out and the moment its pool exists, because both instructions need the coin to be on the curve. The pool is opened by two cranks that anyone can run, and in normal operation we run them immediately. The second one opens the pool and locks the liquidity in a single transaction, so there is no moment at which a pool exists with its liquidity unlocked.

What ends up in the pool(link to this section)

  • The SOL: everything the curve raised, less the graduation fee.
  • The tokens: the reserve held back for the pool, less whatever is burned so that the pool opens at or above the curve's closing price.
  • The pool: Meteora DAMM v2 at a 1% fee, or Raydium CPMM at a 1% fee where every pool address we can use for that coin on Meteora had already been taken by somebody else. The rate is pinned when the migration is prepared, so the anonymous person who runs the crank cannot choose a different one for a pool whose LP is about to be locked forever, and which venue a coin ended up on is written into its own on-chain record, so its page reads the true rate rather than assuming one.

The pool holds 20–47% of the coin(link to this section)

The pool is not the coin. At graduation the pool holds between about 20% and about 47% of the coin's remaining supply, depending on the rung. The rest is already in holders' wallets, bought on the curve.

A normal-sized sell gets about the closing price. On a freshly locked Raydium pool a sell realised 98.9% of the closing price, after the pool's 1% fee.

What the lock means(link to this section)

Which of these applies to your coin depends on where it graduated, and its own page says which. The liquidity is locked forever either way, and the mechanism is not the same on the two venues. Nobody can withdraw it on either, not the coin's chef, not us, not the holder of any key we have, and the lock has no expiry.

  • On Meteora, where a coin goes unless its pool address was already taken: the pool position is ours and is locked by Meteora's own permanent lock in the same transaction that opens the pool. After that the pool program refuses to remove liquidity from it, for any amount, measured against the program Meteora runs on mainnet. There is no LP token and no separate fee key: the position itself is what authorises claiming the fee, and it is held by the coin's own program-derived address. That pool pays its fee in SOL only.
  • On Raydium, the fallback: all of the LP is locked through Raydium's Burn & Earn program. Claiming the fee is authorised by a single NFT minted to the coin's own program-derived address, and the claim instruction burns the memecoin half of every fee in the same transaction.

Nobody can take the liquidity, us included. On either venue, the only thing any key of ours authorises is a fee claim.

Meteora publishes the source of the pool program a coin is locked in. On a Raydium fallback the lock is Raydium's Burn & Earn program. Neither is ours, and neither lets anybody withdraw the liquidity.

Your escrow survives graduation(link to this section)

If the coin graduates while you still have undelivered tokens from the Ramp, nothing is lost. The escrow keeps vesting on the same clock and you can pull it afterwards, and it is sellable on the pool like anything else.