{"slug":"bonding-curve","term":"Bonding Curve","category":"Whales & On-Chain","definition":"A bonding curve is a pricing formula in a smart contract where each token bought raises the price of the next along a fixed curve, and each sold lowers it — no order book, no liquidity providers, just the contract as counterparty. Launchpads like pump.fun use one for a token's first phase, until enough is bought to graduate it to a real pool.","street":"On the curve, the price is a function of how many people arrived before you. Late is expensive by design, and the curve does not care why you came.","depth":["A pump.fun launch starts with the whole supply on the curve; buyers pay along it, and the SOL they pay accumulates in the contract. When the curve fills — around 85 SOL of buying on the classic design — the token graduates: the accumulated SOL and the remaining tokens are moved into a liquidity pool and the curve is retired. Before graduation there is no pool to rug, only the curve; after, there is a pool whose liquidity came from the buyers themselves.","The trading reality: most launches never graduate — in our corpus roughly one in nine — and the ones that do are decided in the first minute by how much SOL arrives and whether it arrives from one bundle of wallets. Our cabal report measures those first-60-seconds features against graduation, and the tape marks graduations as they happen."],"live":{"label":"Tokens that left the bonding curve, on the meme tape (free sign-in)","href":"/meme"},"related":["pump-fun-graduation","liquidity-pool","bundled-launch","sniper-bot","rug-pull"]}