Abstract
A pump.fun coin pays its creator a flat 0.3% of every lamport of quote volume, charged to buyer and seller alike, and the address that fee is payable to is written once at creation with no instruction anywhere in the program to reassign it. This protocol points that fee at a single destination and holds it there: the coin is bought off the open market and destroyed in the same transaction it is bought in, so no interval exists during which the purchased supply can be sold, moved, or quietly not burned. The rate is not a schedule. It is a controller with one input, the ratio of the vault to the market it is buying into, which rises both when the vault fills and when the price falls. The protocol is therefore at its most aggressive exactly when the market is at its weakest, and it is idle when there is nothing to defend. What accumulates is not a reserve. It is an absence: a supply figure that has been reduced by an amount every trader can read off the mint, produced by money every trader paid in, and which no operation in this system can put back.
1The precedent
A glacier is not a lump of ice. It is a flow with a budget, and glaciology has a word for the budget: mass balance, the accumulation of snow above the equilibrium line set against the ablation of ice below it. Where the two are equal the glacier is stationary. Where accumulation wins it advances, and the advance is not a decision anybody made. It is the arithmetic of a system that receives more than it loses, played out at the speed the ice can move.1
The reusable idea is not the ice. It is that the budget is kept by a process with no opinion about the outcome. Snow falls or it does not; the terminus melts or it does not; nothing in the arrangement consults a committee. That is what separates a mass balance from a plan, and it is the only property worth importing into a market, where the equivalent of snowfall is the one flow every venue produces whether or not anybody believes in the asset.
A fee is that flow. It is charged on turnover rather than on direction, so a coin trading sideways all afternoon on constant volume feeds the budget at exactly the rate one trading upward does. Every protocol that promises to spend its fees a particular way has the ambition and not the mechanism. The promise is the easy half.
2The revenue
The only money entering this system is the creator leg of the pump.fun trading fee.2 If V is cumulative quote volume, the revenue is
dR = 0.0030 · dV(1)
and that is the entire monetary base. No emission, no inflation, no treasury sale, no second round. Note what equation (1) does not depend on. Not price, because a fee is charged on turnover. Not holders, who need do nothing at all. Not us. The only input is that people trade.
The mint carries no transfer hook, no transfer fee, no permanent delegate and no freeze authority, and the mint authority was discarded in the transaction that used it. Those are not promises. They are four fields, and they read the same to everybody in one call.
3The equilibrium line
The protocol does not buy on a timer. A timer spends most of its transactions deploying dust and paying fees to do it, and it buys hardest at the moments least worth buying. It buys against one reading, the fraction of the entire market the vault could purchase if it spent everything at once:
coverage = vault / market capitalisation(2)
Coverage rises when the vault fills. It also rises when the price falls, with no new money arriving at all. So a single number carries both halves of the situation, and the controller that reads it becomes more aggressive as the market weakens without anyone deciding that it should.
| Regime | Coverage | Spends | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| THAW | under 2% | 10% | The market is far above the vault. Mostly accumulate; a buy this size is a rounding error to everyone but the fee schedule. |
| SNOWPACK | 2% to 10% | 30% | An even hand. The vault is a visible participant and spends like one. |
| AVALANCHE | over 10% | 70% | The vault is a serious fraction of what it is buying. This is the setting the whole design exists for and it is reached by the price falling, not by anyone turning a dial. |
Below roughly 0.02 SOL a purchase loses more to fees and slippage than it delivers, so a cycle under that threshold is recorded as accumulating and nothing is spent. If volume is thin, blocks are far apart. If volume never comes, no block ever closes, and §5 shows precisely what that costs the holder.
4Inside a block
A block is four steps and one address.
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| Read | The unclaimed balance of the creator vault is read across both pump programs, the bonding curve and the AMM, because the revenue moves from one to the other at graduation and a process that only knew about the first would silently stop finding money on the day it succeeded. |
| Claim | The fee is collected into the vault as native SOL. Claiming and spending are separate decisions: gating the claim on the spend threshold strands money, so anything worth more than the transaction that collects it is collected. |
| Quote | An aggregator route is priced for the amount §3 released, bounded at a fixed slippage. The route returns a guaranteed minimum output, and that number, not the expected output and not a balance, is what the next step destroys. |
| Buy and burn | The swap instructions and the burn instruction go into one transaction. If the swap reverts the burn never runs. If the burn reverts the swap is rolled back with it. There is no state in between. |
That last step is the whole design and it is written against a specific failure. A protocol that buys in one transaction and burns in another has a window, and the window is not theoretical: it has been used. The tokens are sold or moved before the burn lands, the wallet reads empty, the burn destroys nothing, and every log in the system reports a healthy cycle. Atomicity is not an optimisation here. It is the difference between a burn and a report of one.
Where the route delivers more than its guaranteed minimum, the surplus stays in the wallet and is destroyed on a later cycle from a figure the ledger recorded, never from a balance the wallet happens to hold. A balance is not a receipt.
5What accumulates
Write Sn for the supply after block n and Rn for the cumulative SOL spent buying.
Proposition 1 · Monotone supply
Sn+1 ≤ Sn for every block, with strict inequality whenever a block settles.
Proof. Two operations act on the supply. A burn reduces it. A mint would raise it, and the mint authority was discarded at creation, so no account exists that could sign one. A quantity acted on only by operations that do not increase it is non-increasing. ∎
Proposition 2 · The spend is paid by the market
Rn is non-decreasing, and every lamport in it was charged to a trade rather than issued, sold or raised.
Proof. By (1) the only inflow is proportional to volume. The protocol has no other source and no instruction that returns spent SOL to the vault. ∎
Proposition 3 · Idleness is the worst case
If volume stops, the state does not move. No block settles, no SOL is spent, and nothing is lost but time.
Proof. Revenue is proportional to volume, so zero volume accrues nothing and the vault never reaches the threshold in §3. A spend below threshold is not attempted. The failure mode is a pause, not a reversal. ∎
What these propositions do not say. They do not say the price rises: a smaller supply is not a higher price, it is a smaller supply, and the market decides the rest. They do not say the vault is yours. There is no redemption, no claim and no instruction by which a holder can reach the SOL, and there is deliberately no button on this page asking anybody to connect a wallet to anything. They do not say the buying is large: at 0.3% of volume, a million dollars of trading funds three thousand dollars of it, which is the honest reading of the difficulty and is stated here rather than buried. What they say is narrower. The supply is a ratchet, the ratchet is turned by trading, and the figure at the top of this page is the count.
6The log
Every claim, every buy, every burn. Each row is a signature you can open.
Block log
reading the chain
no blocks yet
7Who runs it
pump.fun fixes the destination of the fee. An aggregator prices and executes the route. Neither is ours. The cycle in §4 is: a keeper runs it on a loop, and it holds the key to the launch wallet.
That key cannot mint, because the mint authority was discarded at creation. It cannot redirect the fee, because the creator field is written once and pump.fun's program offers no instruction to change it. It cannot freeze, tax or claw back a transfer, because the mint carries no extension that would allow it. What it can do is stop. If the keeper dies the supply stops falling and the vault stops being spent, which is a pause rather than a reversal, and the SOL that has not been spent yet sits in an address anybody can watch.
Read the propositions that way, as statements about a mechanism running on an operator today, rather than as a guarantee already welded to the chain.
Notes
- Mass balance, the equilibrium line and the ablation zone are borrowed from glaciology as a description of a budget kept without a keeper, not as a claim about ice, climate, or anybody working in that field.
- pump.fun charges a total trading fee of which the creator leg is one part. Every figure here quotes the creator leg only, the 0.3% of volume this protocol actually receives, and never the total the trade pays. The rest is not ours and is nowhere counted.
- Tokens destroyed and supply remaining are read from the mint account itself, not summed from what the keeper believes it burned. If this page and an explorer disagree, believe the explorer.
- The vault figure is the balance of one address, read live. It is the SOL that has been claimed and not yet spent, and it is not a reserve backing anything: §5 is explicit that no holder has a claim on it.
- Every parameter quoted in the prose, the split, the thresholds, the slippage bound and the reward rate, is the same figure the keeper reads. If a parameter changes, every number here changes with it.