Creating a coin on pump.fun: costs, rules and risks

Risks and duties first

• Most coins go nowhere. Of 763,350 coins launched in April 2026, 6,379 graduated to PumpSwap: 0.84% (pumpfundata, on-chain data). Most never attract enough buyers to earn meaningful creator fees.
• Your coin can be used to hurt people. Bundlers and snipers buy the first blocks of many new coins and sell into later buyers. Your buyers carry that risk, and some will blame you.
• Legal duties. pump.fun’s terms bar any message, on any platform, “intended to manipulate a market” or that “spreads false or misleading information” about a coin you created (§3.3). Creators must use creator fees in line with securities, commodities, AML and KYC rules and must not misrepresent fee settings or token economics (§4.6).
• Litigation is live. A US class action over pump.fun coins (Aguilar v. Baton Corp., S.D.N.Y.) continues on RICO claims against pump.fun’s operator and three founders; the securities claims were dismissed on 31 August 2026. See the court case.
• Tax. Creator fees are your income to report (§4.6). See pump.fun taxes.
• No competition edge. Positions in coins you created don’t count in pump.fun trading competitions (Competition Terms, “Own Deployments”).

What it costs

From pump.fun’s Fees page (17 October 2026):

Item	Cost
Creating the coin	No platform fee. Solana network fee plus the SOL deposit (rent) for the token’s on-chain accounts
Buying your own coin at launch	Normal trade fees: 1.25% on the curve plus the 0.45% Platform Fee in the app (Terms §4.9(a) includes “a purchase made when you create”)
Graduation to PumpSwap	0.015 SOL, deducted from the bonding curve for SOL-paired coins

What the creator earns

Every trade pays a creator fee to the creator’s wallet, collected in the quote asset (SOL or USDC), never in the coin itself.

Where the coin trades	Creator fee
Bonding curve (SOL or USDC)	0.300%
PumpSwap canonical pool, under 420 SOL market cap	0.300%
PumpSwap, 420–1,470 SOL	0.950% (the peak)
PumpSwap, then stepping down by market cap	0.900% to 0.075%
PumpSwap, 98,240 SOL and up	0.050%
Non-canonical PumpSwap pools (opened by anyone)	0%
Custom Pair coins	0.30% on the curve, 0.05% in the pool

The USDC ladder has the same shape: 0.30% under 59,000 USDC market cap, peaking at 0.95%, and 0.05% at 20M USDC and up. Fee income is earned only while people trade; a coin nobody trades earns nothing. Full tables: pump.fun fees and creator fees explained.

Choices you make at launch

Some settings are permanent once the coin exists:

• Pairing: SOL, USDC, or a Custom Pair asset on pump.fun’s supported list. Custom Pair coins pay a flat fee schedule.
• Holder Rewards: send the creator fee to holders instead of yourself. Choosing it is permanent, and for Custom Pair coins you set a flat rate from 0.01% up to 3%. pump.fun’s terms say Holder Rewards “may never be paid”. See Holder Rewards.
• Charity coin: route the creator fee to a nonprofit through Donate.gg.
• Mayhem Mode: an AI agent mints an extra 1 billion tokens and trades for 24 hours. pump.fun’s docs warn holders may not all be able to sell if the agent net-sells. See Mayhem Mode.

How creation works, briefly

On pump.fun you choose Create, then give a name, ticker, image and optional description and links, pick the settings above, and confirm a Solana transaction. The coin starts on a bonding curve: a price formula where each buy raises the price and each sell lowers it, until enough is bought for the coin to graduate to its own PumpSwap pool. The supply is fixed at about 1 billion tokens (2 billion for Mayhem coins), and on standard coins the mint and freeze authority are revoked.

If someone else later takes over a coin’s community, pump.fun can transfer creator-fee control through a “community takeover” (CTO) process (§4.6).

Before you do anything

Read is pump.fun safe for the base rates, and make sure you can use pump.fun at all where you live: country guide.