Page 4 of 13
What it costs, exactly
0% on the curve. We get paid when a coin graduates. pump.fun takes a fee on every curve trade; we take none. Our fees start at graduation: a one-time graduation fee, then our share of its pool's 1% fee, 0.8% of volume on Meteora and about 0.378% on a Raydium fallback. Every rate, to the lamport:
Every rate(link to this section)
| Rate | Who gets it | When | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cooking a coin | Solana rent: see what cooking costs | Nobody: it sits in the coin's accounts | At the cook |
| A buy in the Opening Round | nothing | nobody | never |
| A curve trade, our cut | 0%, in SOL | Trenches | Every curve buy and sell |
| The chef's fee, in the coin | 0% on most coins, up to 3% if that coin's chef picked one | That coin's chef, directly, in the coin | Every transfer of the coin: a trade, a swap on its pool, or a plain send |
| Graduation | 3% of the SOL the coin raised, 5% on the $2,500 rung | Trenches | Once, if the coin graduates |
| Trading after graduation | 1%, charged by the coin's own pool | Us, as the pool's locked LP, and the venue | Every swap in the pool |
| Bond, on a coin you cook yourself | 0.05 SOL | Back to you at graduation; to Trenches if it has not graduated in 7 days | At the cook |
Solana's own network fee applies to everything and is not ours.
The two rates on a curve trade, and how to work out what you will pay(link to this section)
A coin can carry two independent rates: ours, which is 0%, in SOL, and its chef's, in the coin. On a coin whose chef took a fee, the chef's rate is the whole of what a trade costs you in fees.
- Ours is 0%, in SOL, on every curve buy and every curve sell. Every trade you sign names the fee it will accept, and the program fails the trade rather than charging you a rate you did not read, so the figure on the coin in front of you is the figure you pay.
- The chef's is 0 unless they opted in, is fixed for the life of the coin, is paid straight to their own wallet and never passes through us. It is a Token-2022 transfer fee on the coin's mint, which is why it is taken in the coin rather than in SOL and why it is charged on every transfer and not only on trades: a curve buy or sell, a swap on the pool after graduation, and sending the coin to another wallet or to an exchange.
Both are shown on the coin before you trade, and both are in the transaction you sign.
Worked numbers(link to this section)
A coin where neither party charges anything (the common case). You buy 1 SOL of it. 1 SOL reaches the curve. You pay Trenches nothing and the chef nothing. You pay Solana's network fee.
A coin whose chef chose 2%, ours at 0. You sign a 1 SOL buy.
- All 1 SOL reaches the curve and buys tokens at the curve's price. Our rate is 0, so no SOL is held back at all.
- Your wallet is debited exactly 1 SOL.
- 2% of the tokens is taken on the way to your wallet and goes to the chef, in the coin. If the curve sold you 1,000,000 tokens, 20,000 of them go to the chef and 980,000 arrive.
- So the fee cost you tokens, not SOL, and the SOL figure on screen was exact.
You then sell those tokens back:
- You send 980,000 tokens. 2% of them, 19,600, is taken before the curve sees them, so the curve is paid on 960,400 and prices your payout off that.
- Our rate is 0, so nothing is withheld from the SOL. You receive what the curve pays, in full.
- A buy and a sell on a 2% coin therefore costs you about 4% of your tokens, because the fee is charged on each transfer and a round trip is two of them.
The graduation fee, worked(link to this section)
Take the $10,000 rung. Its curve sells out at 36.452004861 SOL, the exact cost of buying the last token off that curve.
When it graduates:
- 1.093560145 SOL (3%) goes to our treasury, once.
- 35.358444716 SOL goes into the pool, with about 186.0M of the coin's tokens.
- About 5.75M tokens that were reserved for the pool are burned, because the fee left less SOL to pair them with. The burn is what keeps the pool from opening below the curve's closing price.
- The coin's supply after that burn is about 436.0M, of which the pool holds about 43%.
The $2,500 rung charges 5% because its raise is the smallest and opening a pool costs real SOL, about 0.2 SOL, which the fee has to cover. The other five rungs raise enough that 3% does.
On a coin with a chef fee, the coin mints a little extra for the pool deposit, so the pool still opens at the composition the rung intends and the opening price is not moved by the fee.
The pool fee after graduation(link to this section)
The pool charges 1% and which venue it is depends on the coin. Graduation goes to Meteora DAMM v2; where every pool address we can use for that coin had already been taken by somebody else, it falls back to Raydium CPMM. Each coin's page states its venue, read off the chain rather than assumed.
The 1% is what a trader pays the pool; what reaches us is less. On Meteora the venue keeps a fifth of it, so 0.8% of the volume reaches us, in SOL. On Raydium the fee accrues in whichever token the trader paid in and the memecoin side is burned by the instruction that claims it, so about 0.378% of the volume reaches us, in SOL, moving with how much of that volume was buying. The LP is locked to the coin forever on either venue. What the lock means.