The pump.fun casino floor: how the curve works

Most Solana memecoins now launch straight onto a bonding curve — pump.fun's model, copied everywhere — instead of a normal DEX pool. Nobody seeds liquidity up front; the curve itself is the market, a formula where every buy pushes price up a notch and every sell pushes it back down, no team or vote involved.

What you're buying early on the curve isn't a stake in a project — it's a position on a price formula, racing hundreds of other wallets in and out of the same few minutes. Push the curve far enough (roughly $69k market cap is the usual bar) and the token "graduates": it locks, and the SOL inside becomes real liquidity, deposited into a PumpSwap pool — or Raydium, on some launchpads — where it trades like any other pair.

Graduation isn't a finish line, it's a costume change. The rug risk doesn't vanish — it just moves to a new pool with new exit doors.