Solana launchpads compared
Launchpads look interchangeable from the outside and differ in the places that decide what happens after your token fills. Curve shape, where liquidity ends up, who receives the fees and what the audience expects are all different, and all of them outlive launch day.
What every Solana launchpad shares
Strip away branding and the model is consistent. A token is created with a fixed supply. Buying happens against a bonding curve where price is a function of how much has been purchased rather than of pooled reserves. When the curve fills to a threshold, liquidity is seeded into a standard automated market maker pool and the token graduates into an ordinary market.
Two properties follow from that model regardless of platform. During the curve phase there is a captive audience watching a progress bar, which produces attention that is structural rather than earned. And at graduation, that attention disappears while every pair-level counter resets to zero, because the migrated pool is a new pair with no history.
Teams evaluating launchpads spend most of their attention on the first phase and almost none on the second, which is the wrong ratio given that the second phase is the rest of the token's life.
Where they actually differ
| Dimension | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Migration destination | Decides pool type, fee tier and inherited depth for everything afterwards |
| Graduation threshold | How much buying is needed before the token reaches a real market at all |
| Fee split | Who receives curve-phase fees, and whether creators share in them |
| Seeded liquidity | How deep the pool is on day one of ordinary trading |
| Social layer | Whether replies and favourites exist, which is platform-bound |
| Audience | Who browses that board and what they expect to find |
Deliberately no current figures in that table. Thresholds, fee splits and seeding amounts change often enough that publishing them would create a page that is wrong within a quarter, and a stale number presented confidently is worse than no number. Check the current terms on the platform itself; the dimensions are what stay stable.
The question nobody asks first
If you only investigate one thing before choosing, make it this: where does liquidity end up, and how deep is it on arrival?
That answer determines the pool type your token inherits, which determines whether depth is spread across all prices or concentrated in a range. It determines the fee tier, which is charged on every swap for the rest of the token's life and is usually a larger cumulative number than anything the launchpad took. And it determines the depth a real buyer faces on day one of ordinary trading, which decides whether early attention converts or bounces.
Everything about the curve phase lasts hours or days. This decision lasts for as long as the token does. The post-migration guide covers what actually changes at that handover and why budgets calibrated on curve behaviour mislead afterwards.
Audience is part of the product
The least technical difference is one of the more consequential ones. Each platform's board is browsed by a different population with different expectations, and a token lands into whichever culture it launched in.
Some boards are dominated by fast speculative flow where tokens are evaluated in seconds and abandoned as quickly. Others attract audiences that expect a project rather than a ticker. Neither is better in the abstract; they are better for different tokens. A serious project launching onto a board optimised for churn will be judged by churn standards, and a joke token launching where people expect substance will be judged by those.
Worth spending twenty minutes actually browsing each board before choosing. It is more informative about what you are buying than any comparison table, including this one.
A related point that tends to surprise first-time launchers: most tokens never graduate. Filling a curve requires real buying, and the majority of launches on any board stall part-way and stay there. That is a materially different situation from a token that graduated and then went quiet, because a stalled curve never reaches a standard pool at all and its liquidity remains whatever the formula implies rather than something anyone seeded. When you compare graduation thresholds across platforms, you are comparing how much buying you need to attract before the token enters an ordinary market, which is the more useful way to read that number than as a milestone.
How to choose between them
- Where does liquidity migrate to, and what pool type and fee tier does that imply?
- How deep is the seeded pool relative to the buys you hope to attract afterwards?
- What is the graduation threshold, and is it realistic for your reach?
- Who browses this board, and are they your audience?
- What are the current fees, checked today rather than read in an article?
- Does the social layer matter for what you are building?
Notice that only one of those six is about the curve. That ratio is roughly the right allocation of attention, and it is roughly the inverse of how the decision usually gets made.
A final consideration that rarely appears in comparisons but decides a surprising amount: how easy the platform makes it to find out what happened. Some publish clear documentation of thresholds, fee splits and migration destinations; others leave it to be discovered by launching. That difference is not merely convenience. If you cannot establish in advance where your liquidity will end up and how much will be seeded there, you are making the most consequential decision in the process without information, and you will find out the answer at the exact moment it stops being changeable.
What the choice changes for activity
If you plan to run any campaign, the launchpad choice affects it in two concrete ways.
During the curve phase, execution is contested. Many participants quote against the same curve state inside the same slot, and a large share of transactions fail as a result. This is a property of curves generally rather than of any one platform, and it means curve-phase campaigns deliver less per SOL than the same budget does afterwards. Our weekly block sampling measures the gap and it is not subtle.
After migration, everything depends on the destination pool: its type, its depth and its fee tier. A campaign that struggled on the curve frequently performs quite differently on the pool, and one sized against curve-era results will be wrong in the friendly direction.
The practical implication is simply to know which phase your token is in before sizing anything. The launchpad mechanics guide covers the handover in detail, and the console detects which venues your mint actually trades on so the routing follows the token rather than an assumption about it. You can see which venues those are, and the exact SOL figure for a given target, in the campaign console.
Frequently asked questions
01What is the main difference between Solana launchpads?
Not the curve, which is broadly similar in concept across them, but what happens at graduation. Where liquidity migrates to, who holds it, what fee schedule applies afterwards and which audience the platform brings all differ, and all of them matter for longer than the curve phase does.
02Which launchpad has the lowest fees?
Fee schedules change frequently enough that any figure published here would be stale within months, so check the current terms directly. The more durable point is that launchpad fees apply during the curve phase, while the pool fee at your migration destination applies for the rest of the token life and is usually the larger number over any real horizon.
03Does the launchpad affect where my token trades later?
Yes, and this is the most consequential difference. Migration destination determines the pool type, the fee tier and the depth your token inherits, which in turn decides price impact, failure rates and how a campaign should be sized afterwards.
04Do all launchpad tokens graduate?
No, and most do not. Graduation requires the curve to fill, which requires enough buying. Tokens that stall part-way stay on the curve with whatever liquidity the formula implies and never reach a standard pool, which is a different situation from a token that graduated and went quiet.
05Can I run activity on a token still on the curve?
Yes, though the execution characteristics are very different from an AMM pool. Curves are heavily contested, which we measure weekly, and a substantially larger share of transactions sent to them fail. Budgets calibrated on curve performance therefore understate what the same money achieves after migration.
06Does the choice of launchpad affect the engagement layer?
It does. Reply and favourite mechanics belong to specific platforms rather than to the token, so they are available for mints created on those platforms and not for others. Trading activity is unaffected either way; only the social layer is platform-bound.
Keep reading
The launchpad decides the routing
Pick where the token was created and the console routes across the venues it actually trades on, curve or pool.
Open the volume console