Pump.fun and PumpSwap: a deep dive

The short answer

Pump.fun's bonding curve charges a fixed 1.25% total fee (0.300% creator, 0.95% protocol) on every buy and sell before graduation. At roughly $69,000 market cap (~85 SOL bonded), the curve closes automatically and migrates its real SOL and token reserves into a PumpSwap liquidity pool, for a flat 0.015 SOL fee taken from the pool itself—not billed to any trader (Pump.fun docs). From there, PumpSwap runs as a standard constant-product AMM, with fees that scale down as a token's market cap grows. Every number here has changed more than once in the platform's history—treat this guide as a map of the mechanism, and confirm current rates against the live docs before relying on them.

Bonding curve fees, before graduation

While a token trades on the curve, every buy and sell pays a combined 1.25% fee—0.300% to the token's creator and 0.95% to the Pump.fun protocol, with no LP fee at this stage since there's no external liquidity pool yet (Pump.fun docs). The curve itself uses protocol-defined virtual reserves to set price—the real SOL sitting in the curve only reflects what traders have actually deposited, and only that real balance migrates at graduation. For the curve's pricing mechanics and why this differs from a normal liquidity pool, see bonding curves and launches.

Graduation and migration, mechanically

Pump.fun describes graduation as automatic and irreversible—there is no creator vote or discretionary choice to keep a completed curve open (Pump.fun docs). Onchain, completion and migration are observable stages: the curve is marked complete, then Pump.fun's permissionless and idempotent migrate instruction creates the canonical PumpSwap pool from the designated liquidity. The product automates that handoff, but a trader should still wait for migration confirmation and a fresh pool quote. Pump.fun does not seed or later remove the migrated liquidity; the LP tokens are burned under the program's migration flow.

The 0.015 SOL graduation fee is deducted from the migrating liquidity itself—it's not an extra charge that appears in your wallet's transaction history, which is a common source of confusion when reconciling a graduation event against a personal ledger.

The liquidity migration execution guide covers the completed, migrated, and newly routable states in detail.

PumpSwap's fee schedule

Canonical pools run PumpSwap's standard constant-product AMM, but the total fee isn't flat—it scales down as a coin's SOL-denominated market cap grows, starting near the same 1.25% total charged pre-graduation and gradually declining at higher market-cap tiers, with the split between creator, protocol, and LP fees also changing by tier (CryptoSlate). Pools created manually outside the graduation path—non-canonical pools—use a simpler, flat structure instead: 20 basis points to liquidity providers and 5 basis points to the protocol, for a flat 0.25% total (Pump.fun public docs, GitHub). Exact tier boundaries have moved more than once—check pump.fun/docs/fees for the live schedule rather than treating any single article's numbers as permanent.

The January 2026 creator-fee overhaul

Pump.fun's original creator-fee model paid a single wallet—usually the deployer—a share of every trade, which its own team later said had warped incentives toward fast, low-risk token deployment rather than sustained trading activity. In January 2026, Pump.fun shipped Creator Fee Sharing: creators can now split fees across up to ten wallets, transfer coin ownership, and revoke update authority entirely, with fee assignments settable after launch rather than locked at deploy time (Brave New Coin).

For a trencher, the practical read is: fee-sharing configuration is now something worth checking on a token you're evaluating, since ownership transfers and post-launch fee reassignment are exactly the kind of administrative power that can change hands without a corresponding change in the token's price action.

What a Pump.fun/PumpSwap journal must reconstruct

1. Curve phase vs. AMM phase. Whether a trade executed against the bonding curve or an already-graduated PumpSwap pool—the fee math and price formula differ completely between the two.
2. Fee split. Creator, protocol, and LP fee amounts, kept distinct from the trade's principal—especially important given how often the split has changed.
3. Canonical pool confirmation. Whether the pool a trade routed through was created by protocol graduation or by a manual pool-creation transaction.
4. The graduation event itself, if one occurred mid-position: curve close, pool creation, and the 0.015 SOL fee deducted from the migrating liquidity.

Official sources