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Backing a launch

Backers put SOL behind one of our launches without buying or selling any options. They act as a senior lender to that launch's vault and are paid a share of the launch's creator fees.

It lets people who do not want options exposure still earn from a launch. Backer pools run on Solana mainnet; the program has not been externally audited.

What your SOL does

Each launch has one backer pool, created by the launcher before the token exists, in one of two modes:

  • Backer-funded stake. When the token launches, the vault draws the cost of its stake (5% to 10% of supply, about 1.5 to 3.1 SOL) from the pool. That is the loan. The vault repays it first, out of every bit of SOL it earns.
  • Platform-funded stake. The launcher pays the stake. Every launch from the app works this way. The pool lends only when a call sale needs more tokens than the vault holds and the vault's own SOL cannot buy them.

Either way the loan is senior: the vault repays it from premiums left after its premium-funded buy, from creator fees and from the stall sell-back, before the launch's beneficiary is paid anything.

What you earn

  • 30% of the launch's creator fees, scaled by how full the pool is. The backers' share is 30% x (money in the pool, up to the cap) / cap of each fee collection. A pool at its cap takes the full 30%; a pool at half its cap takes 15%. This scaling exists because, as first built on the EVM, a deposit of almost nothing would have collected the whole 30%.
  • Shared pro rata. Each backer gets their slice of the backers' share in proportion to their shares.
  • A platform stream. 20% of the creator fees of our own platform token are split across backed launches, each day, in proportion to the creator fees each launch reported that day. Launches that trade earn more of it. The platform token does not exist yet.

Rewards accrue as fees are actually collected and can be claimed at any time. The app shows what has been paid per unit backed, not a projected yearly rate.

Locks

  • 1-day lock after each deposit (a new deposit restarts it). This stops someone depositing just before a large fee payment and leaving right after.
  • No exits while the vault owes the pool. Paying one backer out at full value while a loan is outstanding would push that loan's risk onto the others.
  • The pool has a cap set by the launcher; deposits beyond it are refused.

The only loss case

Backers lose money only if the vault owes the pool, the debt has seen no repayment or new draw for 7 days, and every option the vault sold has settled. Then anyone can trigger a write-off: the debt is cancelled and the pool closes to new deposits.

  • Platform-funded pool: backers receive the vault's tokens, valued at the vault's average cost of buying them, in place of the SOL they lent. Those tokens may be worth much less than that.
  • Backer-funded pool: the stake is burned and the unpaid part of the loan is simply lost. The stake is never handed to backers (owner).

The typical way this happens is a token that never makes enough fees to repay, for example a launch that stalls on the curve and whose sell-back cannot recover the stake's cost, or creator fees stopping. On pump.fun fees can stop: pump.fun's admin multisig can redirect a token's creator fees at any time, with no delay and no warning, and did so 56 times in the 12.9 days measured. If that happens to a launch you back, your fee income from it stops too.

What the numbers looked like (EVM research, in ETH)

The only measured backstop numbers come from our research on 613 launches of a different platform (pons, on Robinhood Chain) with a 0.25 ETH cap and the platform-funded design. They are not SOL figures and have not been re-run for pump.fun or for backer-funded stakes:

  • Backers were drawn on at graduation, owed a median of 0.075 ETH at peak (at most 0.14 ETH), and were repaid when the first fees arrived, about 10 minutes later.
  • No launch had a write-off. The worst launch still paid its backers +0.10 ETH.
  • A full pool deposited at graduation and held 24 hours earned 1.82 ETH on average (median 0.89 ETH) on 0.25 ETH.

A backer-funded Solana pool carries a different risk: the whole stake is lent at launch, before the token has graduated, and our pump.fun data shows that 3.2% of launches graduate. That risk has not been modelled.