01Overview

Every coin launched here is created on pump.fun with a 3% creator fee, and that fee is paid to the people holding it. Nothing is minted to fund it and nobody tops it up: a coin can only ever pay out what its own trading earned.

The shape borrowed from bitcoin is the schedule, not the asset. There is a block reward, it is split by hashrate, and it halves on a fixed clock. What differs is what hashrate means: here it is not machines, it is how much you hold and how long you have held it.

Payouts are in SOL, because that is what the creator fee is paid in. The name is the aesthetic; the asset is the chain’s own.

02The block reward

A launch’s block reward is its creator fee: 3% of every trade, taken by pump.fun and credited to a vault keyed by the coin’s creator.

pump.fun lets whoever creates a coin set that fee, up to a ceiling its program publishes — 3% today. Every coin launched here is created at the ceiling. It is fixed at mint and no later transaction can change it, so it is not a setting on the launch form; it is a property of the product. If pump lowers the ceiling, launching pauses rather than quietly creating coins that pay less.

This is also why a coin imported from elsewhere may pay less. A coin created without configuring its fee pays the schedule’s default, 0.3%, and the site reads each coin’s real rate off its curve rather than assuming.

03Miners

Every holder is a miner. There is no separate staking step, no lock and no deposit — holding is the act. The miner set is read from the coin’s own token accounts, so it is the complete holder set rather than whoever happened to trade recently.

The bonding curve and, after migration, the PumpSwap pool both hold the coin too. They are left out structurally: each is owned by a program address, and a program address is by definition not a wallet.

Two consequences worth stating plainly. Splitting a position across wallets changes nothing, because hashrate is linear in size: three wallets with a third each produce exactly what one wallet produced. And selling is the only way to stop mining, which is the whole incentive.

04Hashrate

Hashrate is three numbers multiplied together:

hashrate = holdings × tenure × uptime

holdings

Tokens held, in whole units. The only term you can buy directly.

tenure

1× to 4×, accruing continuously with time held. See tenure.

uptime

1 while mining, halving for each epoch missed, 0 once dark. See uptime.

Your share of an epoch is your hashrate over the sum of everyone else’s. Because two of the three terms cannot be bought, a large new position does not out-mine a small old one by size alone.

05Tenure

Tenure runs from 1× at the moment you buy to 4× after 3 eras held, and it accrues continuously — every epoch, not in jumps at each halving.

It is measured against the pool’s clock, not the chain’s. The keeper records the epoch it first sees each wallet holding the coin, and that is the wallet’s start. Sell out and come back and the record is made again from that epoch. Nobody can have held for longer than the pool has existed, so a launch whose pool started an hour ago has no 4× miners in it however old the coin is.

Tenure is the one thing capital cannot shortcut. Someone arriving today mines at 1× no matter the size of their position, and the only route to the cap is to have been there. Time is the scarce input.

06Uptime

A miner submitting shares is mining. Miss an epoch and uptime halves; miss 4 and it reaches zero and the miner is dark.

A dark miner does not bank its share for later. It is simply absent from the denominator, so what it would have earned is mined by everyone still running. Going offline does not pause your earnings, it hands them to the people who stayed.

Today every holder counts as mining, because holding is the only signal there is. Idle and dark become reachable states once miners can check in on chain.

07Epochs and eras

Two units, and they are easy to confuse:

epoch

60 seconds. One settlement — claim, work out shares, pay.

era

5 epochs, 5 minutes. One halving.

A pool’s epoch counter is the number of epochs the keeper has actually settled for that launch, starting at 0. It is not derived from how long the coin has existed. A pool that has never been mined has not aged, and a keeper that stops stops the clock with it — which is why the site says paused or not started rather than counting down to a halving nothing is going to settle.

Every launch keeps its own counter. Each pool is its own.

08The halving

Each epoch the pool pays out a fixed share of its vault. That share starts at 8.00% and halves every era.

The last column is the part worth understanding. At steady state — fees arriving as fast as they are paid out — the payout equals the fee inflow whatever era it is. Halving does not shrink what miners earn. It doubles the reserve standing behind what they earn.

Each era the pool holds twice as much against the same flow. Stock to flow doubles every halving, mechanically, rather than as a consequence of anything anyone chooses.

09Settlement

Each epoch, per launch, in order:

1. Claim. Pull whatever creator fees have accrued out of pump’s vault into this launch’s own wallet. pump credits fees rather than pushing them, so a wallet that has never been touched still has its fees waiting.
2. Settle. Read holders, record any newcomers in the tenure ledger, compute hashrate, take the era’s emission of the wallet’s balance.
3. Pay. Send each miner its share, largest first, ten to a transaction, and write a receipt for every one.

Every payout is recorded with its signature, keyed on (mint, epoch, miner) — so a keeper that retries a pass it already completed cannot pay the same epoch twice.

Two bounds are deliberate. A share under 0.001 SOL is skipped and stays in the wallet, to be mined again next epoch by whoever is still there — partly because it is not worth its share of a transaction, and partly because a wallet that has never existed cannot receive less than Solana’s rent minimum. And a single epoch sends at most 60 payouts.

10The vault

Every launch has its own fee vault. One coin’s trading can never pay another coin’s miners.

pump.fun routes a coin’s creator fees to whichever key was named as its creator at mint, and one key shares one vault across every coin it created. So every launch here names a fresh key: a wallet derived from the keeper secret plus that launch’s own public salt. The address exists before the launch is signed, the signing key is re-derived on demand rather than stored, and the salt on its own reveals nothing.

A launch spends what it earned, never what it holds. There is no gas float to protect: the keeper wallet pays for every transaction, and the vault only ever co-signs as the account the SOL leaves. A vault keeps a small rent floor so the account itself survives, and everything above it is the miners’.

11Launching

A launch is one transaction. The server builds it — create the coin, name the vault as creator, set the fee to the ceiling — and signs it with the mint; your wallet signs it as the payer; the server broadcasts it and records the result. Nothing about the coin is trusted from the browser after that first step.

The image and the metadata document are pinned to IPFS before the transaction is built, because the URI goes on chain and is immutable afterwards. The form will not submit while the image is still uploading.

A dev buy is optional. Fill it in and the create and your opening buy become a single transaction rather than two — which matters, because the gap between them is public, and anyone watching can take the bottom of the curve in between. Leave it blank and the coin launches with nobody holding it.

12Imported launches

A coin created anywhere on pump.fun can be listed here. Only its mint is taken: name, ticker, image, links, creator and fee rate are all read off the chain, so a mistyped field cannot become a row and a coin that was never created cannot be listed at all.

Whether it mines depends on who its creator is, and that was fixed at mint. If the creator is a wallet configured here, it mines exactly like a native launch, at whatever fee it was created with. If not, it is listed and priced but nothing can claim its fees, and the site says so rather than implying otherwise.

13The keeper

One process settles every pool, once per epoch. It stamps a heartbeat at the start and end of each pass, and the site reads that heartbeat to decide between three states:

running

A pass completed within the last few epochs.

paused

It ran and stopped. Epochs are not settling.

not started

It has never run for this launch.

When it is not running the countdown is replaced by the word, because a clock ticking toward a halving that nothing will settle is a lie told once a second.

14Reading the numbers

market cap

The indexer’s figure where it has one; curve price × supply until then. After migration the curve is drained and the indexer is the only source. A dash means unknown, never zero.

paid out

SOL actually sent to miners. It is a sum of receipts, not an estimate.

the grid

Every holder, area by the square root of hashrate and brightness by its true size. Square root because one holder with most of a supply flattens a linear treemap into a single block.

the chart

The indexer’s price, sampled every five minutes over the last day. A coin it has not seen trade draws nothing rather than a flat line, because unknown and unchanged are different claims.