How pump.fun works, in plain terms

pump.fun made launching a coin on Solana as easy as posting. That is the whole reason it matters: an enormous number of coins, created by anyone, all priced by the same formula from their first trade. If you want to trade there, or copy someone who does, you need to understand three parts: the curve, the migration, and the leaderboard.

What pump.fun actually is

pump.fun is a launchpad for Solana memecoins. You give a coin a name, a ticker and an image, and it exists. There is no presale and no need to put up liquidity: the coin can be bought and sold from the first second because a bonding curve acts as the other side of every trade.

Every coin is a standard Solana token with a fixed supply. Every trade is a Solana transaction, which means every buy and every sell by every wallet is public and permanent. That last fact is what makes copytrading possible at all.

The bonding curve sets the price

Before migration, a coin does not trade against other people's orders. It trades against a curve. When you buy, you put SOL in and the curve hands you tokens. When you sell, you hand tokens back and the curve pays SOL out. The price is a formula of how much SOL the curve holds.

The formula is a constant product on virtual reserves, and it has one property that matters more than any other: the price rises with the square of the SOL in the curve. Early buys move the price a lot, later buys move it less. We work through the numbers in what a big first buy does to a pump.fun price.

• Early is cheap and violent. The first few SOL into a curve move the price more than any later trade.
• Every buy raises the price for the next buyer. There is no way to buy after someone at their price.
• Every sell lowers it for the next seller. Large holders exiting can move the price hard in one transaction.

Migration: when the curve fills

The curve has a fixed allotment of tokens to sell. When it is all sold, the coin "graduates". The SOL raised and the remaining tokens go into a liquidity pool, and from then on the coin trades like any other Solana token. Since 2025 graduating coins go to PumpSwap, pump.fun's own exchange. Earlier, they went to Raydium.

Most coins never get there. The ones that do change character: the price now depends on the depth of the pool, other traders and routers can reach it, and the chart can behave very differently from the curve phase. More in what happens when a coin migrates.

The leaderboard: who is winning, in public

pump.fun publishes a PnL leaderboard of the wallets trading on it, over daily, weekly and monthly windows. Each entry is a wallet, sometimes with a username and an X account, with its profit over the window and the number of positions it traded.

This is the part most people underrate. On most markets, the best traders are invisible. On pump.fun, the wallets that keep getting in early and out in profit are listed on a public page, and every trade they make is on-chain. They are not hiding. The problem is that watching them by hand is too slow to be useful.

Two things to know when you read it:

• Realised versus unrealised. Realised profit is from positions that were actually sold. Unrealised is a mark on positions still held, and it can vanish. Rank on realised. See realised vs unrealised PnL.
• The window is a question. Daily, weekly and monthly boards answer different questions. See the three leaderboard windows.

Why following by hand does not work

You can open a wallet on an explorer, refresh, and buy when it buys. People do. It fails for reasons that have nothing to do with skill:

• The curve punishes delay. Every second between their buy and yours is price you pay. On a young curve that adds up fast.
• The exit gets missed. Buys feel urgent. Sells arrive quietly. People catch entries and miss exits, which is the wrong half to miss.
• Memecoins do not sleep. The trades that mattered happen at 4am your time, and you were asleep.

Four rules that hold up

1. Only trade what you can lose in full. Most coins go to zero. That is not pessimism, it is the base rate.
2. Size per trade, not per mood. A fixed amount per trade and a hard cap keep one bad coin from being a bad month.
3. Care about the exit more than the entry. On a curve, the sell decides the outcome.
4. Select on realised PnL. Screenshots of open positions are not a track record.

Where to go next

If you want to copy one of the wallets on the leaderboard, start with how to copytrade on pump.fun, then how to pick a wallet worth copying. copypump is built for exactly this: pick a wallet from the public leaderboard in Telegram, set your size, and its buys and sells, partial sells included, are copied to your wallet within seconds.