1 · There is no order book. A formula sets the price.
A fresh pump.fun coin has no buyers and sellers matching trades. Instead, a bonding curve — a fixed math formula — sets the price from how much SOL has flowed in. Every coin starts identical, with virtual reserves:
The price is just the ratio of the two reserves. It's a constant product market maker — the same x·y=k math AMMs use — but seeded with fake ("virtual") reserves so the curve starts at a real price with zero real liquidity:
tokens_you_get = 1,073,000,191 − ( 32,190,005,730 / ( 30 + total_SOL_in ) ) price_per_token (in SOL) = ( 30 + total_SOL_in )² / 32,190,005,730
2 · The brutal part: the first dollars get almost everything.
Because price = (reserves)², it's nearly flat at the start and steep at the end. The first ~$500 into a brand-new coin buys a massive share of the supply at near-zero price. By the time the chart "looks alive," the early money already owns it. This is the structural edge snipers and insiders exploit — and exactly what the Hawks scanner filters out.
The table below is live — change the SOL price and watch what each buy size actually does at different points on the curve.
3 · Live simulator
4 · What each buy does, start to graduation
At the SOL price you set above. "Chart move" = how far that single buy pushes the price up from where it started.
| Curve progress | Market cap | $100 buys | $1,000 buys | chart move of a $1k buy |
|---|
5 · How much real money is actually in it?
This is the part nobody says out loud. A coin that "graduated" — the milestone everyone celebrates — took only about 85 SOL (~$12,750 at the SOL price above) of real money to get there, yet shows a market cap near $60–70K. Market cap is supply × last price, not money in the pot. The gap between the two is the illusion: a few thousand dollars of real inflow manufactures a tens-of-thousands "market cap," because the formula prices all 1B tokens off the last tiny trade.
When it graduates, roughly 79 SOL + ~200M tokens seed the AMM pool as the only real liquidity. That's the entire cushion under the price for everyone who buys after. Everything above it is unrealized — paper that only becomes money if someone else pays for it. That is why holding a drawdown and actually selling the next leg up is rare, and why the wallets that pull it off are the Unbroken Hawks.
Constants are pump.fun's documented bonding-curve parameters (virtual reserves 30 SOL / 1.073B tokens, k ≈ 32.19B, graduation ≈ 85 SOL). Pump.fun has charged ~1% trade fees and migrates to its own AMM (PumpSwap); exact fees/migration values change over time. This is an educational model, not financial advice.