Trading

Every token page has a Buy / Sell panel on the right. You type an amount in ETH, confirm in your wallet, and the trade happens. That's the short version — this page is the longer one.

How a trade actually works

There's no order book and no seller to wait for. You're trading against a pool (or, for a brand-new Utility Token, a bonding curve). Either way, the contract is always willing to take the other side.

• Buying: you send ETH, you receive tokens. Tokens leave the pot, so the price ticks up.
• Selling: you send tokens, you receive ETH. Tokens return to the pot, so the price ticks down.

Your own trade moves the price. On a small pool, a large trade moves it a lot. This is normal and is not a bug or a fee — it's just what happens when you take a meaningful share of a finite pot.

Slippage, explained

Between the moment you press Buy and the moment your transaction actually lands, other people can trade. The price can move. Slippage tolerance is you telling the contract: if the price has moved against me by more than this much, cancel the trade instead of filling it.

• Too low (say 0.5% on a busy token) → your transaction fails a lot, and you pay gas for nothing.
• Too high → your trade fills even if the price moved badly against you.

Runitup defaults to 2%, which is a reasonable middle for new tokens. There's a Max 2% figure shown alongside it. If a trade keeps failing, raising slippage slightly is the usual fix.

The three trading states

A token is always in exactly one of these.

1. Meme token — always on a pool

Quick Launch tokens trade against their real pool from the second they launch. No curve, no graduation, nothing to wait for. Buying and selling are both ordinary pool swaps.

2. Utility Token — on the curve

Before graduation there is no pool yet. Buys and sells go to the bonding curve contract instead. The curve sells at a price that rises as supply is bought, and it keeps every ETH that comes in.

The token page shows a progress bar toward the $25,000 graduation threshold. That bar is the curve's savings account filling up — it's not a countdown to something being unlocked for anyone to take, it's the pool's future liquidity being accumulated.

3. Utility Token — after graduation

At $25,000 the curve closes permanently and a real, locked pool opens with that liquidity. From then on it trades like any other pool token.

One technical detail worth knowing: sells route through the token's own sellViaPool function rather than a plain swap. A taxed token deducts a fee on transfer, which means the amount arriving at the pool is smaller than the amount sent — and a normal swap can't cope with that. This is handled for you automatically; you just press Sell. It's the reason a graduated Utility Token can't be sold on an external interface that doesn't know about it.

Why market cap and not price?

Explorer pages and token cards lead with market cap (price × total supply). A newly launched token's price is routinely something like $0.0000045, which is impossible to compare at a glance. Market cap gives you an immediate sense of size. Exact price is still shown on each token's own page.

Before a token's very first trade, the market cap shown is its real configured starting market cap — $3,000 for a Quick Launch, $1,000 for a Utility Token on the curve. These are real values read from the contracts, not placeholders.

Reading a token page

• Chart — market cap over time, with 1m / 5m / 15m / 1h / 4h / 1d intervals and a log toggle. A brand-new token with no trades shows an honest empty chart rather than a fabricated line.
• Recent trades — every buy and sell, with wallet, ETH amount, token amount and time.
• Top holders — who currently holds what, from real indexed balances.
• Token details — price, all-time high, 24h volume, transaction count, holder count, supply, AMM venue, liquidity, and how much the creator has earned.
• Degen stats — whale concentration, how much the creator holds, and how many tokens that creator has launched before. Useful context before you buy.