What happens at Pump.fun migration, step by step

Graduation gets treated as a finish line. In practice the hour after it surprises far more creators than the hour before, because everything about how the coin trades quietly changes underneath them while they are still celebrating.

So let's walk the mechanics first, then what changes for anybody trading your coin afterwards.

The mechanical steps

Three things happen at once, with no human involved anywhere.

First, the curve reaches its migration threshold. Second, SOL collected by the curve contract seeds a liquidity pool on an automated market maker. Third, trading moves there and the curve contract stops being the venue, all inside roughly the same 30 seconds and without anybody clicking anything.

Your mint address doesn't change. Every link, every holding, every explorer page still points at the same token, and the only thing that moved is where swaps execute.

What changes for price

Before migration, price came from a formula tied to cumulative purchases. Deterministic. Given how much had been bought, the next price was calculable to the lamport.

After migration, price comes from the ratio of assets in a pool. Different mechanism, different behaviour, and the practical difference shows up on large orders.

A 30 SOL buy against a thin pool moves price by an amount that depends on pool depth rather than on a formula. So the same trade that would have walked predictably up a curve now walks unpredictably through reserves, which is why slippage settings that worked yesterday sometimes don't today. Bonding curve vs AMM covers the comparison properly.

What changes for visibility

Now the part that genuinely helps you.

Plenty of routing tools, aggregators and screener views only read AMM pools, which means every one of those systems ignored your coin completely for the entire time it sat on the bonding curve, no matter how much volume went through it. After migration they can see it, which widens the set of places a stranger might encounter it.

Real gain, worth understanding correctly. Migration doesn't create demand. It expands the surface area where demand could find you, and those are different things that people routinely conflate.

The gap in the chart

During the moments the pool is created and seeded, trading is briefly unavailable and charts often show a gap or a candle that looks wrong.

Nothing is broken. Screeners are switching which venue they read, and some take 5 or 10 minutes to catch up. If your coin shows odd data for 10 minutes after graduating, wait before diagnosing anything.

Why the hour after catches people out

Now the thing that surprises creators, and it's worth preparing for.

Graduation is a liquidity event. It proves enough net buying happened to fill a curve. It creates exactly zero new reasons for somebody to buy tomorrow morning.

Plenty of coins graduate and go quiet inside 60 minutes, because the attention that carried them there had somewhere else to be. The creator reads that as a failure after a success, when actually the success was always the attention rather than the milestone.

Plan what happens after graduation before you get there. "We'll figure it out" resolves badly at 3am.

What it means for ongoing activity

Is a campaign running when your coin graduates? Then its routing has to change with it.

Any system that only knows how to trade the bonding curve stops working at exactly the moment your coin succeeds. That's an awkward failure, and it's one of the specific questions worth asking any service beforehand: what happens at migration?

Ours follows the coin into whichever pool it lands in and keeps going. What a volume bot actually does lists migration handling alongside the other components that separate a real engine from a loop somebody wrote in an afternoon.

A short checklist for the day it happens

• Expect a brief chart gap, and don't diagnose it for 10 minutes
• Check your coin appears on the routing tools that ignored you before
• Re-check slippage behaviour, since it changes with the venue
• Confirm any running campaign followed you into the pool
• Decide what your reason to exist is now, because the milestone isn't one

Why most coins never graduate covers the harder half of this journey. If your curve is stalled well short of the threshold, the console prices sustained activity against a specific window with the full cost shown before anything is signed.