# Launchpads & Graduation

New launchpad tokens don't start life on a normal DEX. They trade on a **bonding curve** — a pricing contract that is the market until the token "graduates" to a full liquidity pool. Understanding that lifecycle is essential to trading Trenches well.

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## Bonding Curves

A bonding curve is a pricing formula coded into the token's launch contract:

- Every **buy** pushes the price up the curve; every **sell** pushes it back down.
- There is no order book and no separate liquidity pool — you transact with the contract itself.
- Pricing is deterministic: what you pay depends only on how far up the curve your buy pushes it.

Two practical implications:

1. **Earlier is cheaper.** The same spend buys more tokens low on the curve than high on it. The flip side: most tokens never make it far up the curve.
2. **Your size moves the price.** On a fresh token with little behind the curve, even a modest buy has visible price impact. Trenches shows the expected impact before you confirm — and blocks trades where it would exceed 20%.

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## Graduation

When a token completes its bonding curve, its liquidity migrates automatically to a full DEX pool and the curve closes. Where it lands depends on the launchpad:

| Launchpad     | Graduates to  |
| ------------- | ------------- |
| **PumpFun**   | PumpSwap      |
| **LaunchLab** | Raydium       |
| **Meteora**   | Meteora pools |

Each launchpad sets its own graduation threshold, and the **bonding progress bar** on every token card and detail page shows how close a token is. At 100% the token reads **Graduated**.

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**What graduation means for you:**

- **Nothing happens to your holdings.** The tokens in your wallet are the same; only the venue changes.
- **Trading continues seamlessly** — Trenches routes post-graduation trades to the token's new pool automatically (and checks the available venues to fill you at the best price). The buy button simply switches from **SNIPE** to **Buy**.
- **Price can move sharply around the event** in either direction as the market re-prices on the new pool.

***

## The Risk Ledger

- **Graduation is the rare case, not the expected one.** Most launchpad tokens die on the curve.
- **Exits are as brutal as entries are cheap.** Selling pushes the price back down the curve — if holders exit together, the cascade is explicit and there is no LP buffer to absorb it.
- **No graduation can mean no exit.** A token abandoned on its curve may have no meaningful liquidity left to sell into.

> **Warning**
>
> Treat every pre-graduation token as a high-mortality trade by default. The holder-analysis chips and audit strip (see [Finding Tokens](https://onchain.cc/docs/trenches/discovery.md)) exist to keep the odds honest — use them before you size in.