Trading
How buying and selling a coin work on Runitup, step by step, and what slippage is, why it matters more on a fresh pool, and how to set it.
Every token page has a Buy / Sell panel on the right. You type an amount, 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, and 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.
Every token here trades on a real pool from the moment it launches. There is no bonding curve phase and nothing to wait for.
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. If a trade keeps failing, raising slippage slightly is the usual fix.
Paying in something other than ETH
Most pools are quoted in ETH, so ETH is what you spend. A token paired against USDG or a tokenized stock is bought and sold in that asset instead, and the panel tells you which.
A token on the Uniswap V4 venue is bought with WETH rather than native ETH, because that router pulls its input by transfer rather than taking it as payment. The panel handles this by offering a wrap step before the trade — approve it and the buy proceeds normally. A V4 sale pays out WETH for the same reason, so after selling you may be holding wrapped ETH rather than the native kind.
Buying straight from a card
You don't have to open a coin's page to buy it. Cards on the explorer can carry an instant buy button, and one press runs the whole trade from where you are.
It is off until you turn it on, in the card settings, because a buy button on every card in a grid of dozens is a lot of buy buttons. The same dialog is where you set the amount it spends: either a dollar figure or an amount of the chain's own asset. There are chips for the common amounts — $10, $25, $50, $100 and $250, or 0.005 to 0.1 ETH — and you can type your own instead, up to $10,000 or 10 ETH.
The button is one fixed amount, the one you chose. It is not a row of sizes to pick from at the moment of buying; that is what the trade panel on the coin's page is for.
Pressing it opens a small sheet that narrates four steps:
- Switch to the coin's chain, if your wallet is on a different one
- Get the price
- Confirm in your wallet — with an approval step first, where the pool's quote asset needs one
- Wait for the chain, then a receipt with a link to the transaction
Nothing is spent until you sign
The sheet is narration. Your wallet's own prompt is the confirmation, exactly as it is anywhere else, and pressing the button does not commit you to anything — closing the sheet before you sign costs nothing.
The trade itself is run by the same swap widget the coin's page uses, so a quick buy can never route, price or protect a trade differently from the full form. Slippage tolerance and everything else on this page apply unchanged.
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, read from the contracts rather than a placeholder.
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, amount and time.
- Top holders — who currently holds what, from real indexed balances, plus the three summary figures worth checking before you buy: how many holders there are, what the top 10 hold between them, and what the creator holds right now. The pool's own balance and burn addresses are excluded, so a fresh launch does not read as 100% held by one wallet.
- Token details — price, all-time high, 24h volume, transaction count, holder count, supply, AMM venue, liquidity, whether liquidity is locked, and how much the creator has earned.
- Terminals — the same token opened in BasedBot, FOMO, GMGN, Sigma or Maestro, with the contract address already filled in. These are third-party bots, not part of Runitup; see the token page.