Price
What one token costs. It is often a tiny decimal, which makes a small coin feel cheaper than it is.
A campus for first trades
Learn the coin before you fund it.
Teaching the normies instead of extracting them.
No wallet on this campus
Syllabus
Six lectures, in this order.
Read them straight through once. The curve will not make sense if you skip orientation, and the wallet lecture is the one people wish they had taken first.
- 01OrientationWhat you actually buy, and which number the screenshot is hiding.
- 02The curveHow a price gets made when there is no order book yet.
- 03Reading the tapeCandles, volume, holders, and the stories those counts cannot tell.
- 04Risk labSize, exits, and the money that never enters the market.
- 05Field signalsPatterns worth a pause. None of them are a verdict.
- 06The walletWhat connecting does, and what a seed phrase never does.
Lecture 01
Orientation
A memecoin is a token with a price and a story, and usually not much else. On pump.fun, anyone can create one on Solana in about a minute. The page shows a name, a picture, a market cap, and a button that buys it with SOL.
What you are buying is a place in that coin's supply. You are not buying a share of a company, a claim on revenue, or a promise that anyone will buy it after you. The common outcome is a chart that goes quiet. Plan for that one. Let a rare outcome be a surprise, not the assignment.
The name on the coin is decoration. The contract address is the identity. Two coins can share a ticker. Only one address is the one you meant to open.
Market cap
Price times supply. This is the number in almost every screenshot. A small market cap can still go to zero.
SOL
The asset you actually spend and receive. If SOL's own price moves, the dollar value of your bag moves even when the coin does nothing.
Lecture 02
The curve
Before a coin leaves pump.fun, it trades on a bonding curve. There is no list of buyers and sellers waiting. The rule is simple to watch: the more of the supply people have bought, the higher the next price. Sell, and the price steps back down. You are trading with the curve.
That is why one buy can jump the chart. Your order walks up the curve, and you pay a blend of every price along the walk, not the number you saw when you tapped. That gap is slippage. Small orders feel it less. A large order, relative to what is left, feels it immediately.
When enough has been bought, the curve completes. Liquidity moves onto an exchange, and people say the coin graduated. Graduation means the launch phase ended. It does not mean the coin is safe, finished, or likely to rise. A graduated coin can go quiet the same afternoon.
Fees, the exact graduation line, and where liquidity lands have changed before and will change again. Learn the shape here. Confirm the live rule in the app before you put money on it. Every transaction also costs a small network fee, including ones that fail.
First dot. The price on the screen before you buy.
Second dot. Where a larger buy can finish. You pay along the stretch between them. That stretch is slippage.
Exhibit. The shape of the rule, not a live market.
Lecture 03
Reading the tape
The chart is a history of trades, drawn in time. It is not a forecast. We are not adding indicators on top. Those compress the same candles into a second opinion, and they are not how you start.
Exhibit. A made-up coin, so the picture can be honest.
A tall candle on thin volume is a small crowd leaving a big mark. Read the bars under the chart before you trust the height of the candle. A one-minute candle and a one-hour candle are different stories about the same coin. If you cannot say which window you are looking at, you are watching a number change.
Holder count is the figure people wave around to sound safe. Wallets are cheap. One person can look like a crowd.
Ten holders. Four of them can still own almost all of the supply. The count would say ten either way.
Lecture 04
Risk lab
This market does not owe you a return, and it does not offer a refund. The useful work happens before the buy: how much can go to zero, and what you will do if the number goes the other way.
There is no percentage in this lecture that makes a memecoin safe. A size you can lose entirely is the whole formula. If you need the chart to feel okay, the size was wrong.
- 01
Rent money stays home
Food, tuition, bills, and anything you borrowed do not enter. A trade that must work is already too large.
- 02
Size it as a total loss
Decide the amount you can watch disappear without it changing your week. That amount is the position.
- 03
A coin that already ran is not safer
"It did ten times" describes the past. It is also a description of how far the chart can fall on the way back.
- 04
Write the exit while you are calm
A sell plan made before the buy beats a feeling you have later. Taking some off after a move is a finished decision.
- 05
Speed is part of the product
The interface is built so a buy takes seconds. Seconds are a bad unit for the decision. One coin is also not a plan, and five coins that die together are not a plan either.
Lecture 05
Field signals
None of these prove a coin is bad. They are reasons to slow down, which is the skill the button is designed to skip. Doing nothing is a complete decision.
Copycat names
A ticker, picture, or spelling one notch away from a coin that is already famous. Confusion is the product. Match the contract address, not the joke.
Rented attention
The same post, the same minute, in a dozen places. Attention can be bought. A burst of replies that only say "send it" is not a crowd reaching a conclusion.
A heavy creator wallet
The wallet that made the coin still holds a large share, with nothing but "trust" attached. When that supply sells, the curve or the pool takes the other side and the chart finds out.
A closing window
You are told there is no time to read. Urgency is how the only useful minute gets skipped. The first seconds of a new coin are often software that was waiting, not a room of people deciding together.
An address you did not ask for
A contract pasted into a DM, a reply, or a comment. You did not request it. That is the whole review. Open nothing from it until you have found the coin on your own.
Labels you cannot check
Locked, renounced, safe, doxxed. A word in a post is a sentence. If you cannot verify the claim on a block explorer, it is not a fact yet.
Lecture 06
The wallet
This campus never asks you to connect one. There is nothing here to sign. A trading site will ask, because that is how a trade gets proposed. Connecting is not the same thing as handing over the keys.
- 01
The seed phrase stays offline.
It is the master key. Anyone who has it owns the wallet. No lecture, admin, or recovery desk needs it. A request for the phrase, or for a photo of it, ends the conversation.
- 02
Read the approval before you sign.
Connecting lets a site ask your wallet to approve a transaction. A buy is one sentence. Permission for a contract to move every token you hold is a different sentence. If you do not recognize it, reject it.
- 03
Arrive by a bookmark you made.
Type the address, or use a bookmark you created while calm. Copies of real sites live on links in replies. The interface can look perfect and still be the wrong door.
Reference
Glossary
The short versions. If a reply uses a word that is not here, do not let the missing word hurry you.
- ATH
- All-time high. The highest price so far. It is a record of the past, and it is the number people stare at when they are down.
- Bonding curve
- The pricing rule a pump.fun coin trades against before graduation. Buys walk the price up. Sells walk it down.
- Bundle
- A cluster of buys landed in the same instant, often from wallets one party controls. It can make a launch look busy. It is a reason to look harder, not a method.
- Community takeover
- When people other than the creator keep promoting a coin after the creator has sold or left. Also called a CTO. A new story, not a new guarantee.
- Contract address
- The long identifier of one specific token. Names and pictures can be copied. The address is the identity.
- Dev
- Shorthand for the wallet that created the coin. It is not a job title, and it is not proof of skill or honesty.
- Graduation
- The moment the bonding curve completes and liquidity moves to an exchange. A change of venue, not a diploma.
- Liquidity
- The pool of assets that makes buying and selling possible. Thin liquidity means a small trade moves the price a lot.
- Market cap
- Price multiplied by supply. The figure in most screenshots. Small does not mean harmless.
- Memecoin
- A token that trades on attention, jokes, and momentum more than on a product or cash flow.
- Rug
- A collapse caused by insiders pulling liquidity or dumping a large supply. The chart falls because the exit was already in the structure.
- Seed phrase
- The master key to a wallet, usually a list of words. Anyone who has it owns the wallet. No site needs you to type it in.
- Slippage
- The gap between the price on screen and the average price your whole order gets, because the order itself moves the curve.
- SOL
- Solana's asset. On pump.fun you spend and receive SOL. Its dollar price moves on its own, separate from the coin.
- Supply
- How many tokens exist. A tiny price can still be a large market cap if the supply is huge.
- Volume
- How much traded over a period. Price without volume is a small trade leaving a large mark on the chart.
- Wallet
- The account that holds the tokens. Making another one is cheap, which is why a holder count can be a costume.
- Wick
- The thin line on a candle. Price reached that level and came back before the candle closed.
Self-check
Six questions. Nothing is stored.
Grade it when every line has an answer. The point is the sentence under the question, not the fraction.
Answer all six. 0 of 6 marked.