The bonding curve

There is no order book and nobody on the other side of your trade. A formula sets the price, and the only thing that changes it is buying and selling.

How the price moves

The curve holds two things: the SOL people have paid in, and the tokens nobody has bought yet.

  • You buy. Your SOL goes into the curve, tokens come out. Fewer tokens left means the next buyer pays more.
  • You sell. Your tokens go back into the curve, SOL comes out. More tokens available means the next buyer pays less.

That's it. The price is a consequence of how much has been bought, not an opinion anyone holds.

The platform never holds your tokens. They sit in your wallet, and the curve is a program on Solana that you trade against directly. We cannot move them, freeze them or take them.

A worked example

Small numbers, to show the shape:

Say a track's curve currently prices tokens such that 1 SOL buys you roughly 30,000 tokens.

  • You buy 1 SOL worth. You pay the 1% trade fee, and the rest goes into the curve. You get around 30,000 tokens — slightly fewer than 30,000, because the price rose while your own order was filling.
  • The next person buying 1 SOL gets fewer tokens than you did, because you moved the price up.
  • If you sell straight back, you get less than 1 SOL out: the price is now lower than your average buy price, and you pay the fee a second time.

Buying and immediately selling always loses money. You pay the fee twice and you move the price against yourself both ways. The curve makes round-tripping unprofitable by construction.

Slippage

Your trade moves the price as it fills, so the amount you receive is never known exactly in advance. Slippage is how far you'll tolerate the result drifting from the quote before the trade cancels itself instead of filling at a price you didn't want.

On a thin track, a big order can move the price a long way. See Trading.

Market cap

Market cap is the current price times the total supply. It is a quote, not money in a box — you could not sell the whole supply at that price, because selling would push the price down the whole way. The raise figure on a track card is the honest number: SOL actually paid in and sitting in the curve's reserves.