The curve

How a pump.fun launch begins, and what the numbers on a pre-graduation token mean.

What a bonding curve is

A launch does not start with a pool. It starts with a formula: buyers put SOL in, the price rises along a fixed curve, and when enough SOL has accumulated the launch graduates — the curve closes and the accumulated liquidity migrates into a real, tradeable pool.

Until that happens there is no market in the ordinary sense. There is one counterparty and it is arithmetic.

Progress

How far along the curve the launch is, as a percentage. The bar on a feed row is this number.

Progress is not momentum. A launch can sit at 80% for hours, and plenty do — which is why the bar carries a second channel.

Velocity

SOL a minute going in, measured over a recent window. The colour of the progress bar.

This is the reading that separates a launch filling because people are buying from one filling because somebody is pushing it. A high percentage with dead velocity is a launch that stalled; modest progress with strong velocity is one that just started moving.

Where there is not enough recent activity to measure, velocity reads as unknown rather than as zero.

Market cap before graduation

No indexer prices a token that has not migrated, so a cap here is derived from the curve itself — the current curve price against the supply — and converted to dollars at the current SOL rate.

When that rate is too stale to trust, the cap is shown in SOL instead of being converted at a made-up number.

Graduation

At graduation the curve closes, liquidity migrates, and the token becomes tradeable on the open market. This is the moment the full scoring runs, because it is the first moment the launch can be reconstructed end to end.

How long the curve took is recorded permanently and decides the token's cohort — the single most useful fact about a launch.

Not every migration is a graduation

A pool can appear without a real curve behind it — hand-seeded, or migrated and emptied in the same minute. These are marked as not being real graduations and are kept out of the feed, because a one-holder pool with a market cap in single dollars produces enormous meaningless multiples that poison every measurement taken downstream.