A new token just launched on Pump.fun. Telegram channels light up. Twitter bots fire off alerts. Your solana token scanner pings. The chart is a single green candle — vertical, violent, pure adrenaline. The clock is ticking. You have roughly ten minutes before this thing either graduates to Raydium or flatlines into a ghost chart nobody will ever look at again.
This is the most chaotic, information-dense window in all of crypto. And if you don’t understand what’s happening inside it, you’re trading blind. Let’s walk through it in real time — minute by minute — so you know exactly what you’re looking at the next time your memecoin screener lights up with a fresh launch.
Minute 0-1: The Token Hits the Bonding Curve
The token is born. A creator deploys it on Pump.fun, and within milliseconds it exists on the Solana blockchain. There’s no liquidity pool yet — not in the traditional sense. Instead, the token lives on a bonding curve, a mathematical pricing function where every buy pushes the price up and every sell pushes it down.
In the first sixty seconds, a handful of things happen simultaneously:
- The token shows up in real-time token alerts across bots, scanners, and monitoring tools.
- The very first buys land — sometimes from the creator themselves, sometimes from automated snipers.
- The market cap sits somewhere between $3,000 and $8,000. It’s embryonic.
- There’s no chart history. No holder data. No safety analysis yet. Just raw, unfiltered data.
At this stage, the token is a blank canvas. You know the name, the ticker, maybe a description and an image. That’s it. Most serious traders aren’t buying here — they’re watching. The ones who are buying at second zero have a very different strategy, and we’ll get to them.
Minute 1-3: The Initial Pump or the Immediate Fizzle
This is the fork in the road, and it happens fast. Within the first three minutes you’ll see one of two patterns:
Pattern A — The Pump: Buy volume stacks up. The bonding curve progresses from 5% to 15% or even 20%. The market cap climbs past $15K, $25K, $40K. New wallets keep appearing in the holder list. The token is building momentum. Telegram groups start sharing the contract address. If you’re running a memecoin screener, this is the token that floats to the top of your feed.
Pattern B — The Fizzle: A few buys land, the curve inches up to 3-4%, then silence. No new buyers. The creator might sell. The chart goes sideways or starts bleeding. Within three minutes it’s clear nobody cares. This is the fate of 90%+ of pump.fun new tokens. They launch, they spark, and they die before anyone notices.
How do you read it? Volume and velocity. Not just how much SOL has flowed in, but how fast and from how many unique wallets. Three wallets putting in 2 SOL each is very different from one wallet putting in 6 SOL. The first suggests organic interest. The second suggests a creator inflating their own chart.
| Signal | Bullish Read | Bearish Read |
|---|---|---|
| Unique buyers in first 3 min | 10+ distinct wallets | Fewer than 5, concentrated |
| Bonding curve progress | 15%+ and climbing | Stalled under 5% |
| Creator wallet activity | Small initial buy or none | Largest holder by far |
| Social mentions | Organic spread across groups | Single coordinated push |
| Market cap trajectory | Steady climb with pullbacks | One spike then flat |
Minute 3-5: The Safety Check Window
This is the most underrated window in the entire lifecycle. Between minutes three and five, enough data exists to actually evaluate the token — but most of the market hasn’t piled in yet. It’s the brief pocket of time where information and opportunity overlap.
Here’s what you should be checking:
- Mint authority: Has it been revoked? If the creator can still mint new tokens, they can dilute your position to zero. This is non-negotiable.
- Freeze authority: Can the creator freeze transfers? If yes, they can lock you out of selling.
- Top holder concentration: If the top 5 wallets hold 40%+ of supply (excluding the bonding curve), the risk of a coordinated dump is extreme.
- Metadata consistency: Does the token name, image, and description match a coherent project? Or is it a lazy copy-paste of whatever’s trending?
- RugCheck score: Automated safety tools can flag known patterns — bundled launches, suspicious authority settings, copycat contracts.
This is exactly the kind of analysis a good solana token scanner does automatically. Tools like TokenRadar run enrichment pipelines that pull holder data, authority status, and safety scores so you don’t have to manually inspect the blockchain explorer at 2 AM. The difference between checking these signals and skipping them is often the difference between catching a runner and getting rugged.
If you need a deeper dive on what to look for, I wrote a full breakdown of the seven red flags that signal a rug pull on Solana. Bookmark it. Refer to it until the checks become muscle memory.
Minute 5-7: The First Wave of Profit-Taking
If the token made it this far with momentum, something predictable happens around minute five: early buyers start selling. This is the first real test of demand.
The wallets that bought at a $5K market cap are now sitting on 3x, 5x, maybe 10x returns. Some of them will take profit. This creates the first meaningful red candles on the chart — and it shakes out everyone who got in late and panics at the first dip.
Here’s what to watch:
- Does the dip get bought? If new wallets step in and absorb the sell pressure, the token has real demand. This is extremely bullish for a potential graduation.
- How deep is the pullback? A 20-30% retrace after a 5-10x run is healthy. A 60%+ dump with no recovery means the early buyers were the only buyers.
- Does volume stay elevated? Sustained transaction count matters more than price. A token that’s pulling back on high volume is alive. A token that’s flat on no volume is dead.
This is also where slippage starts becoming a real factor. On the bonding curve, larger buys and sells move the price more dramatically than they would on a traditional AMM. If you’re entering during this volatile window, understand that the price you click and the price you get might differ significantly — especially on sells during a dump.
Minute 7-10: Graduation or Death
The bonding curve has a finish line. When enough SOL flows in — roughly 85 SOL worth of market activity — the token “graduates.” Liquidity gets deposited into Raydium, a proper AMM pool is created, and the token enters a completely different trading environment with deeper liquidity and wider visibility.
Between minutes seven and ten, the tokens that survived the profit-taking wave either push toward that graduation threshold or they don’t. There’s no middle ground. The bonding curve is binary in its outcome.
Tokens that graduate typically share these traits:
- Bonding curve progress above 60% by minute seven
- Growing holder count (not just growing market cap from a few whales)
- Active social presence — the community is forming during the launch, not being fabricated after
- A narrative that sticks — a meme, a trend, a cultural moment that gives people a reason to share it
Tokens that die here share different traits: stalled curve progress, a top holder quietly dumping, no new wallet inflows, and a chat that goes from “LFG” to silent in under a minute.
Why Most People Enter at the Wrong Moment
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: by the time most traders hear about a token, the best risk-reward window has already closed. The typical retail flow looks like this:
- Token launches. Snipers and scanners catch it immediately.
- Early manual traders enter between minute 1-4 using real-time token alerts.
- The token pumps. It starts trending on aggregators and social feeds.
- A Crypto Twitter account with 50K followers tweets the contract address.
- Now most people see it — at minute 8, 10, 15, or even after graduation.
By step five, the early holders are your exit liquidity. You’re buying their bags. This isn’t cynicism — it’s market structure. The bonding curve rewards those who are early and punishes those who chase. Understanding this doesn’t mean you should never buy a token that’s already pumped. It means you should know where you are in the lifecycle and size your position accordingly.
The Snipers: Who’s Buying at Second Zero
Let’s talk about the wallets that buy before the token is even one second old. These are automated bots — scripts that monitor the Pump.fun program on-chain and fire transactions the instant a new token creation event is detected. Some are even bundled into the same block as the token deployment itself.
Snipers operate on pure speed. They don’t read the name. They don’t check the image. They don’t evaluate safety. They buy a fixed amount of SOL worth of every single new token — or they filter by basic criteria like whether the creator has a history of successful launches.
Their edge is simple: at the absolute bottom of the bonding curve, even a 2x in market cap (from $4K to $8K) can be a profitable trade if they sell fast enough. They accept a high failure rate because the winners more than pay for the losers.
For manual traders, snipers create an important dynamic: by the time you see a token on your memecoin screener, the snipers are already in. Their initial buys are baked into the price you see. And if they sell in the first wave of profit-taking (minute 5-7), that sell pressure is partially coming from them.
You cannot outrun the bots. Don’t try. Your edge as a human trader is judgment — the ability to evaluate context, narrative, safety, and community in ways that scripts can’t.
What “Being Early” Actually Means
Everyone in this space wants to “be early.” But early doesn’t mean buying at the lowest possible price. Early means having a thesis before the crowd does.
Consider two traders:
- Trader A apes into every single token that shows up on pump.fun new tokens within the first 30 seconds. No analysis. Pure speed. They’re “early” by the clock, but they’re playing a lottery with terrible odds.
- Trader B monitors a solana token scanner and waits for tokens that pass safety checks, show organic holder growth, and have a narrative that matches a current trend. They enter at minute 4-5, after the fizzle risk has passed. They’re “late” by the clock, but they’re early to a validated opportunity.
Trader B has the better strategy. Being early is about filtering, not speed. It’s about seeing a token at minute four, running your checks in sixty seconds, and entering while the broader market is still discovering it at minute eight. That’s the window. That’s the real edge.
The 10-Minute Rule I Follow
After watching thousands of pump.fun new tokens launch, die, graduate, and occasionally moon, I’ve settled on a personal framework. It’s not perfect. Nothing is in this market. But it keeps me disciplined.
- Never buy in the first 60 seconds. Let the snipers do their thing. Let the initial chaos settle. There is no edge in racing bots.
- Between minute 1-3, observe only. Is the curve progressing? Are unique wallets growing? Is there a narrative forming, or is this just another random ticker?
- At minute 3-5, run the safety gauntlet. Mint authority, freeze authority, holder concentration, RugCheck score. If anything fails, walk away. There will be another launch in ten minutes. There always is.
- If everything checks out, enter between minute 4-6 with a position I can afford to lose entirely. Not half my portfolio. Not my rent money. A defined amount that I’ve pre-decided before the adrenaline kicks in.
- Set an exit plan before the entry. I know my take-profit target and my stop-loss level before I click buy. If the token graduates, I reassess. If it stalls, I cut.
- After minute 10, I treat it as a different trade entirely. The launch dynamics are over. It’s now about post-graduation price action, Raydium liquidity depth, and broader market sentiment. Different game, different rules.
The ten-minute window after a token launches is the most compressed, highest-stakes moment in memecoin trading. It rewards preparation over reaction, judgment over speed, and discipline over FOMO. Every launch is a new lesson. The traders who survive long enough to learn from hundreds of them are the ones who eventually develop an intuition that no bot can replicate.
The next time your real-time token alerts fire off and a fresh token lands on your screen, don’t reach for the buy button. Reach for your checklist. The clock is ticking — but ten minutes is longer than you think when you know exactly what to look for.