What Are Launchpads? How Memecoins Actually Get Created

A few years ago, launching a token meant writing a contract, deploying it, seeding a liquidity pool with your own money, and hoping. It cost real capital and required some technical ability.

Launchpads removed both. Now it takes thirty seconds and almost no money, which is why tens of thousands of tokens launch every day.

What they actually do

A launchpad handles the whole deployment in one transaction. Fixed supply, fixed parameters, no choices to make. You supply a name, a ticker, an image, and it exists.

Most of them use a bonding curve rather than a liquidity pool at launch. The contract holds the supply and sells it according to a formula, with the price rising as more is bought. When enough has been bought, the token graduates and the accumulated value seeds a real pool on a DEX.

The consequence worth understanding: at launch there's no liquidity pool to pull, nothing to lock or burn, and no LP to check. That familiar rug vector simply doesn't exist yet, which is not the same as the token being safe.

The main ones

pump.fun on Solana is the original and still the largest by volume. Set the template everyone else copied.

four.meme is the dominant pad on BNB Chain, and it's where a lot of the current memestock activity is originating.

Bonk.fun is the main Solana alternative, with fees routed toward BONK.

Pons is currently the leading pad on Robinhood Chain, though that position has already changed hands once.

Why the dominant pad keeps changing

This is the part people underestimate.

Noxa was the leading launchpad on Robinhood Chain, generated around $12 million in fees, and shut down. The flow moved to Pons and Flap within days, and tens of thousands of tokens a day carried on launching as though nothing had happened.

Pads have almost no lock-in. There's no reason a deployer can't use a different one tomorrow, and traders follow whichever one has the activity. So market share moves fast, and any workflow built around one specific pad breaks the moment that pad dies.

The practical version: build your process around the chain, not the venue.

Why the pad tells you something

Which launchpad a token came from is genuinely informative.

It tells you the mechanics. Bonding curve or direct pool, what the graduation threshold is, what the fee structure looks like, whether LP gets burned automatically. All of that varies by pad and all of it affects your trade.

It tells you what tooling exists. Established pads have bundle checkers, holder analysis and dedicated feeds. A brand new pad has none of that, which means you're checking things manually or not at all.

It's a weak signal about intent. Not a strong one, but a token launched on a pad with anti-snipe features and automatic LP burning tells you slightly more about the deployer than one launched on whatever was cheapest.

The economics, briefly

Launchpads make money on trading fees, taken during the curve and often afterwards. That's the model, and it's why so many exist.

It also explains why launchpad tokens themselves have become a category. Pons and others have their own tokens with real market caps, because a pad capturing meaningful trade flow is genuinely a business. That's a different asset from the memecoins launching on it, and worth not confusing.

What this means for trading launches

Most tokens on any pad go to zero. Only a small share of pump.fun launches ever graduate, and that's roughly the picture everywhere. The base rate is the base rate.

The pad doesn't vet anything. Permissionless means permissionless. There's no review, no approval, no standard. A token existing on a well-known pad tells you nothing about whether it's a scam.

Being early is mechanical. On a curve, price is a function of how much has been bought. That's why sniping exists as a strategy and why supply concentration at launch is worth checking through the bundle lens.

Watch where the flow goes. New pads gaining share is one of the more reliable signals that attention is rotating, and it usually precedes the price action rather than following it.

Trading across them

Axxel supports Ethereum, Base, BSC, Solana and Robinhood Chain, with sniper, market, limit and trailing orders, stop loss and take profit, MEV protection, and configurable slippage and tax limits. Flat 0.9%, non-custodial, no subscription.

Being set up across chains matters more than being set up on any particular pad, because the pads churn and the chains don't. When the dominant one changes, and it will, the flow moves within days.

Crypto trading carries risk. Most memecoins lose value. Nothing here is financial advice. Axxel is not available in all regions.