How Does Pump.Fun Make Money?

@Pumpfun makes money by taking a cut of every trade on its platform. Every buy and every sell runs through a fee, and the platform keeps the largest slice for itself, whether a token runs or dies within the hour. Launching a token costs nothing beyond tiny network fees, and that is the whole point. Free creation drives enormous volume, and volume is where the money is. It is closer to a casino floor than a startup: the house does not need any single bet to win, it just needs people to keep playing. That model has now generated nearly $1.9 billion in lifetime fees and made Pump.fun the first application on Solana to surpass $1 billion in revenue. This month it also passed a quieter milestone: more than $800 million in fee income converted into cash. What does Pump.fun actually charge? Fees split across two stages of a token's life. New tokens start on a bonding curve, a contract that sells a fixed supply in sequence. Once enough of that supply is bought, the token "graduates" and moves to PumpSwap, Pump.fun's own automated market maker. Here is how the cut breaks down: Bonding curve trades: a total fee of 1.25% on every buy and sell, split 0.95% to the protocol and 0.30% to the token creator. There is no liquidity provider fee at this stage, and it applies to both SOL and USDC pairs. The protocol's 0.95% is the single biggest source of revenue by a wide margin. Graduation: when a token migrates to PumpSwap, Pump.fun takes a flat 0.015 SOL from the token's liquidity, historically at a market cap somewhere around $69,000 to $90,000. PumpSwap trades: fees here are dynamic and shrink as a token's market cap grows, to encourage deeper liquidity. The protocol share sits near 0.05%, with a liquidity provider fee around 0.20% and a creator fee that starts high and tapers. The total drops from roughly 1.25% at small caps toward 0.30% at the largest ones. A creator revenue-sharing system, expanded through 2025 and 2026, routes a bigger portion of fees to the people launching tokens. That rewards builders who stick around, but it does not touch the protocol's own slice, which comes off the top either way. The uncomfortable truth underneath all of this is that the vast majority of tokens launched on Pump.fun never generate meaningful fees. A small number of graduated survivors carry the revenue. The platform does not care which ones win, because it earns on the churn. How much has Pump.fun actually made? Across its whole stack, the bonding curve plus PumpSwap, Pump.fun has pulled in about $1.86 billion in cumulative fees.