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.

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.

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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) exist to keep the odds honest — use them before you size in.