How it works
The bonding curve
Every new coin starts on a bonding curve: a formula that is always ready to buy or sell, so there's a price from the first second and no one has to provide liquidity.
How the price moves
The curve holds two balances, the coin and the pair asset, and keeps their product constant, the same rule Uniswap uses. Buying adds pair asset and takes coins out, so each coin costs a little more than the last. Selling does the reverse.
To give a new coin a sensible starting price, the curve starts with virtual reserves: amounts that set the price but can't be withdrawn. The price of the first coin sold is the virtual pair-asset balance divided by the virtual coin balance.
The numbers
| Robinhood Chain | Solana | |
|---|---|---|
| Total supply | 1,000,000,000 | 1,000,000,000 |
| Sold on the curve | 800,000,000 (80%) | 793,100,000 (79.31%) |
| Moved to the pool at graduation | 200,000,000 | 206,900,000 |
| Raise to graduate | About 85 SOL of value, roughly $10K, in whatever the coin is paired with | |
| Graduates to | Uniswap V2 | Raydium CPMM |
The progress bar on each coin is the share of its curve tokens sold so far.
Raise size
Every curve raises the same value no matter what it's paired with, so a coin paired with NVDA isn't easier or harder to graduate than one paired with SOL. On Solana the size is fixed at launch from live prices. On Robinhood Chain, curve sizes for new launches are re-priced hourly on weekdays to follow stock prices; a coin's own curve never changes once it has launched.
Graduation
The buy that sells out the curve triggers graduation. Everything the curve raised, plus the reserved coins, goes into a new public pool, and the pool's LP tokens (the claim on that liquidity) are burned. No one, including the creator and the platform, can ever withdraw that liquidity.