That “Graduated” Label Means More Than You Think
You’re scrolling through new Solana tokens on a solana token scanner and you notice it: a small label that says “Graduated” or “Migrated.” Some tokens have it. Most don’t. You might have clicked past it a hundred times without thinking twice.
That label is one of the most important signals in memecoin trading. It separates the 98% of tokens that die on arrival from the tiny fraction that actually made it to a real market. It changes how the token trades, where it trades, how much liquidity backs it, and what kind of risk you’re taking.
If you’re trading pump.fun new tokens or watching new solana tokens hit the market, understanding graduation isn’t optional. It’s the difference between gambling on a bonding curve and trading on a real exchange.
What Token Graduation Actually Is
Every token created on Pump.fun starts its life on a bonding curve. There’s no liquidity pool, no order book, no listing on Jupiter or Raydium. The token exists inside a smart contract that automatically adjusts the price based on a mathematical formula — more buys push the price up, sells bring it back down.
Graduation is the moment a token leaves the bonding curve and migrates to Raydium, Solana’s largest AMM-based decentralized exchange. The SOL sitting in the bonding curve’s reserve gets used to create a real liquidity pool. The remaining unsold tokens get paired with that SOL. The bonding curve closes permanently, and the token starts trading like any other token on the open market.
Think of it this way: the bonding curve is the incubator. Raydium is the real world. Graduation is when the token proves it has enough momentum to survive outside the incubator.
The Graduation Threshold
A Pump.fun token graduates when approximately 85 SOL accumulates in the bonding curve reserve. At current SOL prices, this roughly translates to a market cap around $69,000 on the bonding curve — though the exact dollar figure fluctuates with SOL’s price.
Here’s what that means in practical terms:
- Enough people have to buy the token to push approximately 85 SOL into the reserve. Not just one whale — sustained buying pressure from multiple wallets.
- Sellers work against graduation. Every sell pulls SOL out of the reserve, moving the token further from the threshold. A token can be 90% of the way to graduation and get dumped back to 30%.
- Speed matters. Tokens that graduate quickly — within 10-30 minutes of launch — tend to have genuine momentum. Tokens that take hours to crawl toward the threshold often stall or reverse.
Out of the tens of thousands of pump.fun new tokens created daily, only about 1-3% ever reach this threshold. The rest stall, get dumped, or slowly bleed out until nobody’s left trading them.
Step by Step: What Happens During Graduation
When the bonding curve hits the threshold, a migration transaction fires automatically. Here’s the sequence:
- The bonding curve locks. No more buys or sells through the Pump.fun contract. If you have a pending transaction, it fails.
- SOL is extracted from the reserve. The approximately 85 SOL gets pulled from the bonding curve contract.
- A Raydium liquidity pool is created. The SOL is paired with the remaining unsold tokens from the curve’s supply to create an AMM pool on Raydium.
- LP tokens are burned. The liquidity provider tokens representing ownership of the pool are burned — meaning nobody can pull the liquidity. This is a critical safety feature.
- Trading resumes on Raydium. The token is now tradeable through Raydium’s AMM, accessible via Jupiter aggregator, and visible on chart platforms like GeckoTerminal and DexScreener.
The entire process takes a few seconds on-chain. But during those seconds, trading is frozen. If you were about to buy or sell on the bonding curve, your transaction gets rejected. This brief pause is one of the reasons graduation creates such volatile price action — orders pile up on both sides.
Before vs. After: What Changes for Traders
Graduation fundamentally changes the trading environment. Here’s a direct comparison:
| Factor | Pre-Graduation (Bonding Curve) | Post-Graduation (Raydium) |
|---|---|---|
| Trading venue | Pump.fun only | Raydium, Jupiter, any Solana DEX aggregator |
| Liquidity | Only the SOL reserve (often under 50 SOL) | Full AMM pool (~85 SOL + tokens), can grow with volume |
| Price discovery | Formula-driven (bonding curve math) | Market-driven (supply and demand in the pool) |
| Slippage | Extreme on even small trades | Lower, improves as liquidity grows |
| Visibility | Only on Pump.fun and specialized scanners | Charts on GeckoTerminal, DexScreener, Birdeye, etc. |
| Wallet support | Must use Pump.fun interface or direct contract calls | Any Solana wallet via Jupiter swap |
| Bot activity | Limited to Pump.fun sniper bots | Full exposure to MEV bots, arb bots, copy traders |
| LP safety | No LP exists (bonding curve is the mechanism) | LP tokens burned — liquidity is locked permanently |
The shift from formula-driven pricing to market-driven pricing is the big one. On the bonding curve, the price follows a predictable mathematical path. After graduation, price is determined by the balance of buyers and sellers in a decentralized exchange pool — which means it can move in ways the bonding curve never allowed.
Why Graduation Is a Bullish Signal
When you’re scanning new solana tokens and you see one that’s graduated, that alone tells you several things:
- Real buying pressure existed. Someone — or many people — put approximately 85 SOL into this token. That’s not trivial.
- The token survived its most vulnerable phase. The bonding curve period is where 97%+ of tokens die. Making it through means the token had enough interest to avoid the graveyard.
- Liquidity is locked. LP tokens are burned during migration. The creator can’t pull the rug by draining the liquidity pool — a common attack on tokens that launch directly on Raydium.
- Wider market access is now open. Jupiter aggregation, chart visibility, and broader wallet support mean more potential buyers can find and trade the token.
This doesn’t mean every graduated token is safe or will go up. It means the token has cleared a meaningful hurdle that most don’t survive. It’s a filter — not a guarantee.
The Graduation Trap: Why Some Tokens Dump Immediately After
Here’s something that catches a lot of traders off guard: some tokens graduate and immediately crash 30-50% within minutes. You’d think graduation means up only. It doesn’t.
There are several reasons this happens:
Early buyers taking profits. People who bought at the bottom of the bonding curve — at fractions of a penny — are now sitting on 10-50x gains. Graduation is their exit signal. They bought for the curve ride, and now they’re cashing out into the fresh Raydium liquidity.
The “sell the news” effect. Some traders specifically target pre-graduation tokens, ride them to migration, and sell immediately after. It’s a known playbook. When enough people run the same strategy, the selling pressure at graduation is overwhelming.
Bots front-running the migration. Sophisticated bots monitor the bonding curve progress and pre-position to sell the moment migration completes. They’re faster than any human, and they hit the new Raydium pool before most traders even realize graduation happened.
Liquidity rebalancing. The transition from bonding curve pricing to AMM pricing doesn’t always match perfectly. The initial Raydium price can gap up or down from the last bonding curve price, creating instant arbitrage that bots exploit aggressively.
Not every graduation dumps. Some tokens rocket higher after migrating because new buyers flood in from Jupiter and chart platforms. The difference usually comes down to community strength and whether the token has a narrative beyond “number go up.”
How to Trade the Graduation Event
There are three distinct strategies around graduation, each with different risk profiles:
Strategy 1: Buy pre-graduation, sell into the migration. This means buying tokens that are 50-70% of the way to graduation and selling just before or just after they migrate. You’re betting on the momentum that carries a token to graduation, not on what happens after. Risk: the token stalls and never graduates, leaving you holding a dying bonding curve position.
Strategy 2: Wait for graduation, buy the dip after. Many graduated tokens dump in the first 5-15 minutes as early holders take profit. If the token finds a floor and buying resumes, that post-graduation dip can be an entry point with better risk/reward than buying on the curve. Risk: the token never recovers and bleeds out slowly on Raydium.
Strategy 3: Only trade post-graduation tokens. Skip the bonding curve entirely. Only buy tokens that have already graduated, have shown 15-30 minutes of stable trading on Raydium, and are building volume and holders. This is the safest approach — you sacrifice the biggest early gains but avoid the 97% of tokens that never make it. A solana memecoin tracker that filters by graduation status makes this strategy practical.
Whichever approach you take, the key is having a plan before the graduation event. The worst position to be in is holding a token on the bonding curve and not knowing whether you’re supposed to sell or hold through migration.
Pre-Graduation vs. Post-Graduation: Which Is Better to Trade?
This depends entirely on your risk tolerance and speed.
Pre-graduation trading offers the biggest potential upside. Buying at the bottom of a bonding curve that eventually graduates is how people post those 50-100x gain screenshots. But you’re fighting brutal odds. You need to identify winners within minutes of creation, among thousands of pump.fun new tokens launching daily. You need to be fast, decisive, and willing to lose your entire position on the majority of trades.
Post-graduation trading offers more information and lower risk. You know the token survived the bonding curve. You can see the Raydium chart, check real liquidity depth, analyze holder distribution, and verify safety metrics. The gains are more modest — 2-10x instead of 50-100x — but the hit rate is significantly higher.
Many experienced traders use a hybrid approach: they allocate a small portion of their capital to pre-graduation plays (high risk, high reward) and the majority to post-graduation tokens that have already proven some level of viability. Using a solana memecoin tracker that shows both bonding curve progress and post-migration data makes it possible to run both strategies simultaneously.
How to Track Graduations in Real Time
Graduation events happen constantly. On a busy day, hundreds of tokens can migrate from Pump.fun to Raydium. If you’re trading this space, you need a way to track them as they happen — not five minutes later when the opportunity is gone.
Here’s what to look for in a solana token scanner:
- Real-time migration alerts. You want to know the moment a token graduates, not when the chart eventually shows up on DexScreener. Seconds matter.
- Bonding curve progress tracking. Before graduation, seeing how close a token is to the threshold — and how fast it’s moving — tells you whether migration is imminent.
- Post-graduation safety data. Once a token migrates, you need instant access to holder distribution, authority status (mint/freeze), liquidity depth, and rug-check analysis.
- Source filtering. Being able to filter new solana tokens by source — showing only graduated tokens that came from Pump.fun vs. tokens that launched directly on Raydium — gives you cleaner signals.
TokenRadar tracks this entire pipeline. New pump.fun new tokens appear the moment they’re created, migration events are flagged in real time, and every graduated token gets automatic safety analysis including RugCheck scores, authority status, and holder concentration data. You can filter specifically for recently migrated tokens — catching them in the critical first minutes after graduation when the biggest price moves happen.
Graduation is one of the few events in memecoin trading that’s both predictable (you can see it coming on the bonding curve) and genuinely meaningful (it changes the token’s fundamentals). Whether you trade before, during, or after — understanding exactly what’s happening under the hood gives you an edge that most traders in this market simply don’t have.