How it works

How the colony works.

Everything about how this works: why every coin is paired with $COLONY, where each trade's fee goes, how your share is worked out, and what it does and does not promise. Every figure on this page is produced by the same code that pays holders.

01

Overview

A launchpad on pump.fun where coins trade against $COLONY instead of SOL, and the fees every coin earns are paid to the people holding.

The short version

  • Every coin is paired with $COLONY. To buy a coin launched here you pay in $COLONY. So every launch, and every buyer, needs $COLONY.
  • Every trade pays a fee, and holders get it. pump.fun pays each coin a creator fee on every trade. Here that fee is not kept by the creator. It is sold for SOL and paid to holders.
  • Your share follows how much you hold and for how long. A single score decides the split. Holding more raises it, holding longer raises it, selling lowers it.
  • You are paid in SOL, to your wallet. Nothing to stake, lock, claim or sign.

Who earns what

Each coin's fees are split in two, every time:

If you holdYou earn fromYour part of it
A coin launched hereThat coin's trading fees50% of them, split by score
$COLONYEvery coin's trading fees50% of each, split by score
BothBoth of the aboveBoth, worked out separately

The two are independent. Your score in a coin is about your holding of that coin. Your score in $COLONY is about your holding of $COLONY.

02

The pair

Why every coin here trades against $COLONY, and what that does.

How pairing works

A coin on pump.fun trades against one other asset, its pair. For most coins that is SOL: you pay SOL to buy and receive SOL when you sell. pump.fun also lets a coin be paired with another pump.fun coin. Then you pay in that coin to buy, and receive it when you sell.

Every coin launched here is paired with $COLONY. The choice is made at launch and stored on the coin by pump.fun. It is not a setting on this site that could be switched later.

The pair

buying flows down

Colony$COLONYPAIR
every coin here is bought with $COLONY
1Coin 1Paired with $COLONY
2Coin 2Paired with $COLONY
3Coin 3Paired with $COLONY

every new coin adds another branch, and another reason to hold $COLONY

The infinite flywheel

  1. 01A coin launchesIt is paired to $COLONY, so its price is in $COLONY.
  2. 02Buyers need $COLONYNobody can buy it with anything else. Every buyer buys $COLONY first.
  3. 03$COLONY stays in the coinWhat buyers pay sits in the coin's market, held in $COLONY.
  4. 04It joins the colonyEvery coin paired to $COLONY is part of the colony, and its holders are paid its fees in SOL.

The flywheel

Pairing turns each new coin into demand for $COLONY:

  1. 01

    A coin launches

    Its price is quoted in $COLONY. Nobody can buy it with anything else.

  2. 02

    Buyers need $COLONY

    Whoever wants the new coin buys $COLONY first, or already holds it.

  3. 03

    $COLONY sits in the coin

    What buyers pay stays in the coin's market as its liquidity, held in $COLONY.

  4. 04

    $COLONY holders are paid

    50% of the coin's fees go to people holding $COLONY, which is a reason to keep holding it.

The more coins launch and trade, the more $COLONY is needed and the more fees flow to the people holding it. That is the whole design: one coin that every other coin leans on.

Buying and selling

A paired coin behaves like any other pump.fun coin. It starts on a bonding curve, the price rises as people buy, and when the curve fills it graduates to pump.fun's AMM and keeps trading there. It appears wherever pump.fun coins appear.

The only difference is the currency. Prices are in $COLONY. pump.fun can route a purchase made with SOL through $COLONY in a single transaction, so a buyer does not have to do two trades by hand.

A new coin's starting price follows $COLONY's price at that moment, because pump.fun works out the size of the new curve from $COLONY's live market.

Launching opens when $COLONY goes live.

03

Where the fees go

From a trade on pump.fun to SOL in a holder's wallet.

Where fees come from

On every buy and sell, pump.fun takes a trading fee, and a part of it is the creator fee: the cut pump.fun sets aside for whoever created the coin. The rate is pump.fun's, not ours.

Because a coin here trades against $COLONY, its creator fee is earned in $COLONY, not in SOL. And the creator of every coin here is not a person. It is a wallet made for that one coin, which exists only to pass the fees on.

Collect, sell, split, pay

A program called the keeper runs about once a minute. For every coin, each time, it does four things:

  1. 01

    Collect

    The coin's creator fees are collected into the coin's own fee wallet, in $COLONY.

  2. 02

    Sell for SOL

    That $COLONY is sold on $COLONY's own pump.fun market, in sales small enough not to push the price.

  3. 03

    Split

    50% of the SOL is for the coin's holders, 50% for $COLONY holders.

  4. 04

    Pay

    Each side is divided by score and sent to holders' wallets as SOL.

The keeper's own wallet pays every network fee along the way. Network fees are never taken out of what holders are owed.

How fees are sold

Selling $COLONY for SOL moves $COLONY's price a little, and a careless seller would hurt the very people being paid. So the keeper follows fixed limits:

RuleLimit
Most one sale may move the price2%
Most a sale may fall short of its estimate1%
Smallest amount worth collecting0.003 SOL
Smallest amount worth selling0.005 SOL
  • Sized to the market. If a coin's fees are larger than the market can take within the price limit, only the part that fits is sold. The rest waits.
  • Checked before sending. Each sale is simulated first. If the real price comes in more than 1% worse, the sale is refused by the chain and nothing is sold.
  • Retried, never dropped. Whatever was too small, or did not fit, stays in the coin's fee wallet as $COLONY and is tried again a minute later. Nothing is lost by waiting.

One wallet per coin

Each coin has its own fee wallet, and only that coin's fees ever reach it. What it holds belongs to that coin and no other. Fees from different coins are never pooled before they are split, so there is nothing to untangle afterwards and no way for one coin's holders to be paid from another coin's fees.

The 50% that belongs to $COLONY holders is moved from each coin's wallet to a separate pool wallet, and paid out from there.

You can look

Every coin's page links to its fee wallet, and every payment links to its transaction. All of it is on chain.

04

The score

One number per wallet per coin. Your share of a payout is your score divided by everyone's.

The same formula is used for every coin, and for $COLONY itself. There are no modes, no tiers and no special wallets.

The formula

Holders are counted about once a minute. At each count, for each wallet, take before (its balance at the last count) and now (its balance at this one):

1. if now < before:   score = score × (now / before)       a sell gives up its share
2.                    score = score × 0.5^(days / 7)         old score fades
3. held = min(before, now)
                      score = score + held × days × rate        held tokens earn
4. rate = 1 + 2 × (days held, up to 30) / 30               1x rising to 3x
SettingValueWhat it does
Half-life7 daysHow fast old score fades
Full rate after30 daysHow long until tokens earn at the top rate
Top rate3xHow much faster a long-held token earns
Ceiling per token30.3The most score one token can ever carry

Why it is built this way

  • Amount and time both count. Score grows with tokens held multiplied by days held. Neither a big bag bought a minute ago nor a tiny one held for ever takes the pot.
  • Only tokens held between two counts earn. Step 3 uses the smaller of the two balances. Tokens bought just before a count earn nothing for that minute, so there is nothing to gain by timing a buy.
  • Long holders earn faster. A wallet's rate starts at 1x and climbs to 3x over 30 days of holding, then stays there.
  • Nobody is locked out. Old score fades: left alone it halves every 7 days. So score measures recent holding, not everything since launch, and it has a ceiling. A wallet that has held for a year is not a year ahead of you.
  • The count's timing does not matter. The maths gives the same answer whether holders are counted every minute or every hour, so a slow keeper does not change anyone's share.

How a score grows

One wallet buys 1,000,000 tokens and simply holds them:

3%
21%
39%
77%
99%
100%
1d · 1.07x7d · 1.47x14d · 1.93x30d · 3.00x60d · 3.00x90d · 3.00x
Score, as a share of the most this holding can ever carry
Held forRateScoreOf the ceiling
1 day1.07x984,3443%
7 days1.47x6,362,66721%
14 days1.93x11,900,40339%
30 days3.00x23,328,27777%
60 days3.00x29,939,32399%
90 days3.00x30,278,278100%

The ceiling for 1,000,000 tokens is 30,296,596: the score it settles at if held for ever. A score means nothing on its own. It only matters next to the other wallets' scores in the same coin.

New holders catch up

Take a wallet that has held 1,000,000 tokens for a year, and a new wallet that buys the same amount today. If they were the only two holders, the new wallet's share of each payout would be:

new holderyear-long holder
1 day96.9%
7 days17.4%82.6%
30 days43.5%56.5%
60 days49.7%50.3%
AfterNew holderYear-long holder
1 day3.1%96.9%
7 days17.4%82.6%
30 days43.5%56.5%
60 days49.7%50.3%

Within two months they are level. Being early is an advantage for a while, not for ever.

Buying more

Buying more never costs you score. The tokens you already held keep everything they earned. The new tokens join at 1x, so the wallet's rate becomes the average of old and new, weighted by how many of each there are.

A wallet at full rateTokensRateScore
Before1,000,0003.00x23,328,277
Doubles its holding2,000,0002.00x23,356,968
15 days later2,000,0003.00x46,215,943

The score does not drop when the wallet buys. The rate dips because half its tokens are new, then climbs back as they age.

Splitting a bag

Every step of the formula is proportional to the balance. So the same tokens score the same whether they sit in one wallet or in ten:

Held for 14 daysScore
One wallet with 1,000,00011,900,403
Two wallets with 500,000 each5,950,201 + 5,950,201 = 11,900,403

There is nothing to gain by spreading tokens across wallets, and nothing to lose.

05

What selling costs

Selling a part of your holding gives up the same part of your score.

Sell a quarter, lose a quarter of your score, at the next count. Sell everything and it is gone. Buying back does not bring it back: the tokens you buy start with no score and a 1x rate.

A worked example

A wallet has held 1,000,000 tokens for 30 days. Its score is 23,328,277 and it earns at 3.00x. It sells half, changes its mind, and buys the half back an hour later.

23,328,277
11,664,139
11,692,771
17,258,485
26,841,069
beforesells halfbuys backa week onnever sold
The same wallet's score, step by step
What happensScoreRate
Before23,328,2773.00x
Sells half11,664,1393.00x
Buys it back an hour later11,692,7712.00x
A week after that17,258,4852.47x
The same week, had it never sold26,841,0693.00x

Same tokens, same wallet, one hour out of the position. A week later that round trip still costs the wallet 36% of its score, and so that much of every payout.

Why the cost is proportional

A harsher rule is easy to imagine: lose everything on any sell. It would not work. A holder could keep their tokens in several wallets and sell from one, leaving the others' scores untouched. The harsh rule would only punish people honest enough to use a single wallet.

Losing exactly the share you sold is the strongest penalty that cannot be dodged that way. It is the same whether you hold in one wallet or many.

Moving tokens

Moving tokens counts as selling. From the outside, sending tokens to another wallet looks exactly like a sale: the balance went down. The score for those tokens is given up, and the wallet that receives them starts from zero.

Before you move a bag

If you plan to move your holding to a different wallet, know that its score does not travel with it.

06

Payouts

Plain SOL transfers to the wallet that holds the tokens.

A payout, step by step

Say a coin's fees have just been sold for 1.0000 SOL. This is a made-up amount to show the arithmetic. First the split:

Goes toShareSOL
The coin's holders50%0.5000
$COLONY holders50%0.5000

Then the coin's half is divided between its holders by score. With three of them:

HolderHoldsForScoreShareReceives
Ada2,000,00030 days46,656,55469.0%0.3449 SOL
Ben2,000,0005 days9,309,61813.8%0.0688 SOL
Cy500,00030 days11,664,13917.2%0.0862 SOL

Ada and Ben hold the same amount, but Ada has held six times longer and receives far more. Cy holds a quarter of what Ben does, yet has held long enough to earn more than him.

When you are paid

Each minute, the SOL in a coin's fee wallet that is not already owed to someone is split by score and added to what each wallet is owed. A wallet is sent its SOL as soon as it is owed 0.002 SOL in a coin.

  • Smaller amounts stay owed and keep adding up. They are not lost and they do not expire.
  • What you are owed is yours even if you sell afterwards. Selling changes future shares, not past ones.
  • There is nothing to claim and nothing to sign. The SOL simply arrives.

Who is not paid

Only ordinary wallets earn. These hold tokens but have no score:

  • A coin's bonding curve and its AMM pool. Liquidity does not take a share.
  • Any other account owned by a program rather than a person.
  • The fee wallets and the keeper's own wallet.

A coin's creator is treated like anyone else. If they hold their coin, their wallet is scored and paid by the same rules.

Where to see them

  • Payouts lists every payment on the site, newest first, each with its transaction.
  • Each coin's page shows how much has gone to its holders and to $COLONY holders, and every transfer out of its fee wallet.
  • Connect your wallet on a coin's page to see what you hold, your rate, your score, your share, what you have been paid and what you are still owed.

07

Holding $COLONY

$COLONY earns from every coin on the site at once.

50% of every launched coin's fees, once sold for SOL, are moved to a pool for $COLONY holders. That pool is split by exactly the same score, worked out on each wallet's $COLONY balance, and paid in SOL by the same rules.

  • It adds up across coins. One coin's fees may be small. The pool collects from all of them.
  • It grows with launches. Each new coin is another source of fees for the pool, and another market that needs $COLONY to trade.
  • The same holding rules apply. Your $COLONY score rises with amount and time, fades if you stop holding, and drops in proportion when you sell.

Using $COLONY to buy another coin lowers your $COLONY balance, so it gives up that share of your $COLONY score, like any sale. You then start earning as a holder of the coin you bought.

08

Launching a coin

A name, a ticker, an image, one signature.

What you do

  1. 01

    Fill in the form

    Name, ticker and image are required. A description, an X link and a website are optional.

  2. 02

    Sign once

    The coin is created on pump.fun in a single transaction that your wallet signs.

  3. 03

    It is live

    It trades on pump.fun's bonding curve, paired with $COLONY, and appears on the tree here.

  4. 04

    Holders are paid

    From the first trade, its fees are collected, sold for SOL and paid out.

You pay pump.fun's account rent and the network fee, in SOL. Keep about 0.03 SOL in your wallet. There is no launch fee here. Launch a coin.

The first buy

You can buy some of your own coin inside the launch transaction, so nobody can buy before you. It is paid in $COLONY from your wallet.

  • The amount you type is the most you will spend. The buy is sized up to 5% below it, to leave room for $COLONY's price moving before the transaction lands.
  • Your wallet has to hold that much $COLONY already.
  • The tokens you buy are scored like anyone else's.

What cannot change

  • The pair. Your coin trades against $COLONY for good.
  • Where the fees go. They go to holders. You do not receive the creator fees, and there is no switch that sends them to you later.
  • The name, ticker and image. They are written when the coin is created.

If you want to earn from your own coin

Hold it. The creator's wallet is scored and paid like every other holder's.

09

Checking it yourself

You do not have to take any of this on trust.

  • Fee wallets are public. Each coin's page links to its fee wallet. You can watch fees arrive, be sold, and go out.
  • Every payment has a transaction. Each row on the payouts page and on a coin's page links to it.
  • The pair is on the coin. pump.fun shows what a coin is paired with.
  • The numbers here are live code. The tables on this page are not typed in. They are worked out, when the page is built, by the same function that scores wallets. If the rules changed, these tables would change with them.

10

Risks and limits

What this is not, said plainly.

  • Payouts depend on trading. Fees come from trades. A coin nobody trades pays nothing. Nothing here is a promise of income.
  • Payouts depend on the keeper. Collecting, selling and paying are done by a program this site runs, using keys this site holds. If it stops, fees stay where they are (in pump.fun's vault or the coin's fee wallet) until it runs again. It is not a smart contract and it has not been audited.
  • The SOL you receive depends on $COLONY's price. Fees are earned in $COLONY and sold at the market price at that moment.
  • Prices can fall. Being paid for holding does not protect the value of what you hold. A payout can be worth less than a drop in price.
  • Counts are about a minute apart. A sell and a buy-back that both happen between two counts are not seen. Across a count, they are.
  • Tokens held elsewhere are not yours on chain. Tokens on an exchange or inside another program are counted for that account, not for you.
  • pump.fun sets the rules of the market. The fee rate, the curve and the pairing itself are pump.fun's and can change.

11

Questions

Do I have to stake, lock or claim anything?

No. You hold the coin in your own wallet and the SOL is sent to that wallet. There is nothing to deposit and nothing to sign.

How soon after buying do I start earning?

From the next count, about a minute later. Tokens have to be held from one count to the next to earn, and they start at a 1x rate.

When will I see my first payment?

As soon as you are owed 0.002 SOL in a coin. How long that takes depends on how much the coin trades and on your share. Until then the amount shows as owed on the coin's page when your wallet is connected.

Why am I paid in SOL and not in the coin?

Paying holders in the coin itself would hand them more of what they already hold. Fees are earned in $COLONY and sold for SOL so that what arrives is money you can use anywhere.

My share went down but I did not sell. Why?

Your share is your score against everyone else's. If other wallets bought more or have been holding longer, the total rose and your part of it fell, even though your own score did not.

Does it matter which wallet I use?

Only in that score stays with the wallet. Moving tokens between your own wallets counts as selling from one and buying into the other.

Can the creator of a coin take the fees?

No. The creator of record for every coin here is a wallet this site made for that coin, not the person who launched it. The launcher has no access to it.

What happens when a coin graduates?

It moves from the bonding curve to pump.fun's AMM and keeps trading against $COLONY. Fees keep being collected and paid the same way.

Is there a minimum holding?

No minimum to be scored. Very small holdings earn very small amounts, which stay owed until they reach 0.002 SOL.

Do I need $COLONY to be paid from a coin I hold?

No. Holding a coin earns from that coin's half. Holding $COLONY earns from the other half of every coin. They are separate.

12

Glossary

Pair
What a coin trades against. Here, always $COLONY.
Platform coin
$COLONY: the coin every other coin is paired with.
Creator fee
The part of pump.fun's trading fee set aside for a coin's creator.
Fee wallet
A wallet made for one coin. Its fees are collected, sold and paid from there.
Keeper
The program that counts holders, collects fees, sells them and pays out.
Count
One pass of the keeper, about once a minute, when balances are read.
Score
The number that decides a wallet's share of a coin's payouts.
Rate
How fast a wallet's tokens earn score: 1x when new, up to 3x.
Half-life
The 7 days it takes old score to fade by half.
Bonding curve
pump.fun's starting market for a coin, where price rises as people buy.
Graduating
Filling the bonding curve and moving to pump.fun's AMM.
Owed
SOL assigned to a wallet and not yet sent, because it is under 0.002 SOL.

That is all of it.