What Happens to Liquidity When a Pump.fun Token Graduates to Raydium?

06 November 2026

When a Pump.fun token completes its bonding curve and graduates to Raydium, the liquidity that was locked in the Pump.fun smart contract is automatically transferred to a Raydium liquidity pool on the Solana blockchain. This is a one-time, irreversible process designed to give the token a secondary market with deeper liquidity than the original bonding curve allowed.

The graduation trigger and liquidity transfer

Graduation occurs when the bonding curve reaches 100% - meaning the token's price has risen through all predefined curve steps until the entire supply allocated to the curve is sold. At that exact moment, the Pump.fun smart contract executes two actions:

1. It burns the liquidity pool (LP) tokens. Pump.fun creates a permanent liquidity pool on Raydium where no one - not even the token creator - can withdraw the liquidity afterward. The LP tokens are sent to a dead wallet (burn address), making the liquidity permanently locked.

2. It transfers the collected SOL from the bonding curve into the new Raydium pool. All the SOL that buyers paid during the bonding curve phase - minus Pump.fun's 1% fee and a small SOL fee for the Raydium pool creation - becomes the SOL side of the new liquidity pair. The token side is a fixed amount of the token supply that was reserved for the Raydium pool at launch.

The result is a standard Raydium constant-product automated market maker (AMM) pool, where trades swap between the token and SOL at a price determined by the pool's reserves.

What the new liquidity looks like

Once the graduation is complete, the token can be traded on Raydium with the same mechanics as any other Raydium pool. Key properties:

• The initial price is set by the final bonding curve price. The ratio of token to SOL in the new pool matches the price at 100% curve completion. This is not arbitrary; it is calculated from the last trade on the bonding curve.
• Liquidity is permanently locked. Because the LP tokens are burned, no one can remove the liquidity. This is a strong anti-rug-pull feature for the post-graduation market. However, a token can still be rugged after graduation if the developer holds a large supply and sells it into the Raydium pool.
• The pool is a standard Raydium pool. It appears on Raydium's UI, is tradeable via any Solana swap aggregator, and is subject to Raydium's fees (typically 0.25% per trade, split between liquidity providers - but since LP tokens are burned, no one earns those fees).
• The initial pool size is small relative to typical Raydium pools. Pump.fun tokens often graduate with only a few hundred to a few thousand SOL in liquidity. This makes them highly volatile and susceptible to large price swings from moderate buy or sell pressure.

What does not happen

• No new tokens are created. The total supply remains the same as when the token was created on Pump.fun. The only change is that a portion of that supply moves from the bonding curve contract to the Raydium pool.
• No additional fees are charged by Pump.fun. The graduation itself has no extra cost beyond the small SOL fee for pool creation (typically around 0.01 - 0.02 SOL, deducted from the bonding curve proceeds).
• The bonding curve contract becomes inactive. After graduation, the Pump.fun bonding curve for that token is permanently closed. No further trades can occur on Pump.fun for that token. All trading moves to Raydium.

Risks After Graduation

Graduation does not guarantee a token is safe or will hold value. Common issues:

• Dev sells into the pool. If the developer holds a large portion of the supply (e.g., from an initial mint or pre-sale), they can sell it into the Raydium pool, crashing the price. Graduation locks the pool liquidity, not the developer's tokens.
• Low liquidity means high slippage. With only a few thousand SOL in the pool, a trade of a few hundred SOL can move the price 10 - 20% or more. Large trades are expensive or impossible without significant price impact.
• No one earns trading fees. Because LP tokens are burned, there is no incentive for liquidity providers to add more liquidity. The pool will never grow unless someone voluntarily adds liquidity - and because LP tokens are burned, that added liquidity would also be locked permanently. In practice, few people do this.
• The pool can be abandoned. If trading volume dries up, the token becomes illiquid. There is no mechanism to revive or migrate the pool.

How to Check the Graduated Pool

After a token graduates, you can verify the Raydium pool by:

1. Finding the token's contract address on Pump.fun (it is the same after graduation).
2. Searching that address on a Solana explorer like Solscan or Birch.
3. Looking for a Raydium liquidity pool that contains the token and SOL. The pool address will be different from the token address.
4. Confirming the LP tokens are burned. Check that the LP token mint has its supply sent to a dead wallet. This is visible on the explorer under the pool's "Liquidity" tab.

If you cannot find a Raydium pool, the token may not have graduated. Some tokens on Pump.fun will show a "Graduated" label but actually only reached the "King of the Hill" milestone - a temporary top-1 position - without completing the bonding curve. Graduation only occurs at 100%.

Summary

Liquidity graduation is a one-way transfer from Pump.fun's bonding curve to a locked Raydium pool. It provides a permanent secondary market but with small, volatile liquidity. The safety benefit is that liquidity cannot be withdrawn. The risk is that the token's price is still entirely determined by supply and demand in a thin market.

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