How Do Meme Coin Creators Make Money? 4 Real Ways (2026)

Meme coin creators make money through four documented mechanisms: (1) launchpad creator rewards, where pump.fun pays the creator 0.05% of the token's trading volume in SOL; (2) LP fee share, where seeding and holding a Raydium pool earns 84% of every swap fee; (3) selling a disclosed creator allocation; and (4) appreciation on retained tokens, which stays a paper number until sold. All four scale with trading volume, not with launching. Most tokens never generate meaningful volume, so most creators earn close to nothing: 87% of Solana memecoins lose 90%+ of peak market cap within 24 hours. Fee mechanisms are documented. Outcomes are not, and none of this is financial advice.

Quick Facts

Across the launches we've tracked since 2022, one pattern holds: creators who got paid were paid by volume. Not by launching. A token that trades 20,000 SOL of cumulative volume pays its creator 10 SOL through pump.fun's reward program; a token that trades 40 SOL pays 0.02 SOL, which doesn't even cover the creation fee. Everything below is either a percentage of trading activity or a claim on retained supply, and I'll show the division for each.

One scope note before the mechanisms. This is a creator-side guide. If you're evaluating whether to buy someone else's token, nothing here is investment guidance, and we don't write for buyers.

The four ways meme coin creators actually get paid

Do meme coin creators make money? Some do, through exactly four mechanisms, and the map below shows where each one's money actually comes from.

flowchart TD
  V[Trading volume on your token] --> A["Mechanism 1: pump.fun creator rewards, 0.05% of volume in SOL"]
  V --> B["Mechanism 2: Raydium LP fee share, 84% of the trade fee"]
  S[Retained supply in your wallet] --> C["Mechanism 3: disclosed allocation sales"]
  S --> D["Mechanism 4: appreciation, paper until sold"]
  A --> W[Creator wallet]
  B --> W
  C --> W
  D -.->|only via a real exit| W

Notice what feeds the top two boxes in that flow: volume, not the launch event. Mechanisms 3 and 4 feed off retained supply instead, which is why they carry the trust-optics risk the first two don't.

Now the base rate, before any earnings talk. In the 50,000-launch dataset behind why most Solana memecoins die in 24 hours, 87 out of every 100 launches lose more than 90% of peak market cap within a day, and 96 are functionally dead within a week. Dead tokens produce no volume. No volume, no fees. Whatever mechanism you pick, the earning problem is really a distribution and marketing problem wearing a fee schedule.

Mechanism 1: launchpad creator rewards on pump.fun

pump.fun pays token creators 0.05% of their coin's trading volume, in SOL, claimable from the creator dashboard. The program went live on May 12, 2025, per CoinDesk's launch coverage, and it was framed as sharing roughly 50% of PumpSwap's fee revenue with creators, per The Block. At that rate, $10 million of volume pays the creator about $5,000 in SOL. Rewards accrue both while the coin sits on the bonding curve and after it graduates to PumpSwap. The current schedule lives in pump.fun's official docs, and note the old docs.pump.fun URLs now redirect there (verified July 10, 2026).

Context for that rate: creating the token costs 0.02 SOL, the curve charges 1% per buy plus 1% per sell, and graduation fires at roughly 85 SOL of cumulative buys ($69k market cap). Only about 1.4% of launches ever graduate, per our pump.fun breakdown. So the 0.05% is real, documented, and paid on a token population where the median coin stops trading within hours. (My first rewards claim, in June 2025, paid 0.31 SOL on a coin that had already flatlined. One signature, honest payout, tiny number.)

Worth being precise about whose money this is. Your 0.05% is the creator's cut; the platform's own take on the same volume is an order of magnitude larger, and we reverse-engineered it in how much money pump.fun makes. A deeper walkthrough of claim flows and rate history deserves its own post, so this stays at mechanism level.

Mechanism 2: LP fee share on Raydium

Skip the launchpad, seed your own Raydium pool, keep the LP tokens, and swap fees accrue to you directly. Raydium's CPMM fee docs split every trade fee 84% to LP holders, 12% to the protocol treasury, 4% to the fund account. Fee tiers are creator-selectable at pool creation: 0.05%, 0.25%, 0.3%, 1%, or 4%, per the pool creation guide. On the 1% tier (the memecoin standard in our dataset), a creator holding 100% of LP earns 0.84% of volume. That's nearly 17× pump.fun's reward rate per unit of volume. The 0.25% constant is even visible in code, as LIQUIDITY_FEES_NUMERATOR = 25 over 10,000 in raydium-sdk's liquidity.ts. Raydium's docs also describe an optional, independent creator fee on CPMM pools, disabled by default; most memecoin pools never touch it.

The prerequisite is capital: 5-25 SOL of seed liquidity plus ~0.4 SOL of one-time pool rent, walked through in how to add liquidity to Raydium. And there's a catch that dominates everything else.

flowchart TD
  A[Raydium pool seeded, LP tokens in your wallet] --> B{Hold or burn?}
  B -->|Hold| C[Earn 84% of trade fees while LP is yours]
  C --> D[DexScreener shows unlocked liquidity]
  D --> E[Buyers price in rug risk, volume suffers]
  B -->|Burn| F[Zero LP fee income, ever]
  F --> G[Locked badge, strongest trust signal on day one]

Hold-for-fees versus burn-for-trust is a genuine tension, as the decision flow above shows. Buyers run this check on DexScreener's Solana board without leaving the chart page: the liquidity column and the lock icon are the first two things a scanner looks at. We held LP on a 2024 launch to farm the 1% tier instead of burning. Fee income that first week was about 1.8 SOL; the cost was a Telegram that spent the entire week asking why liquidity wasn't locked, and the chart never recovered from the doubt. We'd burn on day one if we ran it back, then share the proof the way our LP burn proof guide lays out.

Also note the PumpSwap contrast: graduated pump.fun tokens have their LP auto-burned to the incinerator at graduation, as covered in what is PumpSwap, with the AMM itself verifiable at program pAMMBay6oceH9fJKBRHGP5D4bD4sWpmSwMn52FMfXEA. A graduated creator earns zero LP fee income by construction. Mechanism 1 is their whole fee story. If you want LP fee share at all, you need your own pool, which is exactly what alchemii's liquidity builder sets up without code.

Mechanism 3: creator allocation, and where the rug line is

Retaining part of the supply and selling it later is real income, and pretending otherwise would make this article dishonest. On a direct launch, the SPL Token Program mints the initial supply wherever the mint authority points it — the mint_to handler in the program's processor source checks exactly one thing, the mint-authority signature — which in practice means 100% of tokens start in the creator's wallet before the pool is seeded. Whatever you don't deposit into liquidity is your allocation.

Here is the line, stated plainly. Disclosed and gradual is a business model; undisclosed and dumped is a soft rug. Same tokens and the same sell button, but a completely different act. Disclosure means the allocation percentage is public before launch and sits in a labeled wallet, then unwinds slowly against real volume. A soft rug means buyers discover the stash only when it hits the chart. The decision tree below is the whole test:

flowchart TD
  A[You retained part of the supply] --> B{Disclosed publicly before launch?}
  B -->|Yes| C{Selling gradually against real volume?}
  B -->|No| D[Reads as a soft rug to buyers]
  C -->|Yes| E[Legitimate creator income]
  C -->|No, dumped at the first spike| D
  D --> F[Holders tab exposes it within minutes]

Buyers audit this in about 30 seconds, so assume they will. Click through to BONK's mint on Solscan and open the Holders tab: every wallet's share of the 100 trillion supply (5 decimals) is ranked and public. Your token gets the same X-ray. For scale, on a 1-billion-supply config like WIF's (1B supply, 6 decimals), a 5% allocation is 50 million tokens sitting in one visible wallet.

Practical norms from watching launches since 2022: single-digit percentages with public disclosure get tolerated; 20%+ in one anonymous wallet kills buy-side interest on sight. Selling into your own pool also pushes the price against you on every fill, which is where this mechanism hands off to the next one.

Mechanism 4: appreciation on retained tokens

Ranked last on purpose. Appreciation is the mechanism everyone imagines and the least reliable one in practice, because it isn't income until a real pool absorbs your exit. A retained bag doubling in quoted price is a paper number; realized profit is capped by what the liquidity can take without collapsing the chart you're selling into.

Recorded history only, no forecasts. BONK reached its all-time high of $0.00005825 on November 19, 2024 and trades 93% below that peak as of this writing, at roughly a $361M market cap, per CoinGecko's BONK page (retrieved July 10, 2026). That is the trajectory of one of the most successful Solana memecoins ever. The median token from the 87% cohort never gives its creator a single profitable exit window. If your earnings plan is "hold and hope," you've chosen the mechanism with no documented rate, no schedule, no floor, and no promised exit window.

Worked example: the volume it takes to clear 10 SOL in creator fees

Everything in this section is hypothetical math, not a projection. These are fee-schedule divisions at assumed volumes. No volume level is typical, promised, or predicted.

Days to 10 SOL = 10 ÷ (daily volume in SOL × effective rate) — plug in your own assumed volume and the rate for your path:

• pump.fun creator rewards (0.05% = 0.0005): 10 ÷ 0.0005 = 20,000 SOL of cumulative volume (~$4M at SOL=$200). Call it 20,000 to clear 10 SOL. Actually 20,040, once you net out the 0.02 SOL creation cost, but the rounding isn't the lesson.
• Raydium 1% tier, holding 100% of LP (0.84% = 0.0084): 10 ÷ 0.0084 ≈ 1,190 SOL of volume (~$238k).
• Raydium 0.25% tier (0.21% = 0.0021): 10 ÷ 0.0021 ≈ 4,762 SOL of volume (~$952k).

Hypothetical: days to clear 10 SOL at assumed daily volume
(labels = mechanism @ effective rate)

daily volume      pump.fun @ 0.05%      Raydium 1% tier @ 0.84%
100 SOL/day       200 days              ~12 days
500 SOL/day       40 days               ~2.4 days
2,000 SOL/day     10 days               ~0.6 days
20,000 SOL/day    1 day                 <0.1 days

Read the ladder above against reality. BONK, a top-tier token, did $43.3M of 24-hour volume (~216,000 SOL at $200) on July 10, 2026 per CoinGecko, cross-checkable against Birdeye's BONK dashboard if you want a second data source on the same mint. A median launch from the 87% cohort does under 100 SOL of volume in its entire life. At 100 SOL lifetime volume, creator rewards pay 0.05 SOL. Total.

The LP path looks 17× better per unit of volume, and it is, gross. Net is different. Subtract the cost stack first: ~0.002 SOL mint rent + ~0.012 SOL Metaplex metadata rent + ~0.002 SOL ATA (the full stack is in what it costs to create a Solana token), plus ~0.4 SOL Raydium pool rent, plus alchemii's 0.01 SOL service fee per LP action, plus every claim or burn transaction paying Solana's 5,000-lamport base fee per signature. Then remember the seed itself: 5-25 SOL locked in the pool, unrecoverable if you burn, exposed to impermanent loss if you don't. On a 1% tier, fee income only exceeds a 5 SOL seed after ~600 SOL of volume, and most tokens never trade 600 SOL.

The four mechanisms compared

Decision guidance by launch path: with zero capital, the pump.fun route makes Mechanism 1 your entire fee income, since graduation burns the LP for you. With 5+ SOL of seed and a volume thesis, a direct Raydium launch through alchemii's LP tool opens Mechanism 2, and you choose between fee income and the burn. Running trust-first, the strongest combination we've seen is a direct launch with LP burned at minute zero, income coming from a disclosed single-digit allocation unwound slowly, mechanics of the burn itself in how to burn LP tokens.

Limitations

• Not financial advice, and not legal or tax advice either. Whether selling a creator allocation creates obligations in your jurisdiction is a question for counsel, not a blog.
• Fee schedules change. pump.fun's creator-rewards terms have already evolved since the May 2025 launch, and Raydium's docs describe its rates as admin-mutable. Verify pump.fun/docs and Raydium's fee page before you build a plan on any number here.
• pump.fun claim flows and reward-rate history are out of scope. This post covers the mechanism; a dedicated creator-rewards deep dive will own the walkthrough.
• Buyer-side evaluation is out of scope. We write for creators; this is not a guide to judging other people's tokens.
• Token-2022 transfer-fee extensions and CLMM fee math aren't modeled. A transfer-fee mint is a fifth revenue lever on paper, with its own wallet-compatibility costs, and concentrated-liquidity fee income behaves nothing like the CPMM math above.
• The worked example ignores MEV. Sniper and sandwich losses on thin pools routinely exceed early fee income; aggregate platform volume for scale-checking lives on DefiLlama's pump.fun page.

FAQ

Do meme coin creators actually make money?

A small minority do. Four documented mechanisms exist: pump.fun creator rewards (0.05% of trading volume, paid in SOL), Raydium LP fee share (84% of the trade fee goes to LP holders), selling a disclosed creator allocation, and appreciation on retained tokens. All four scale with trading volume, and 87% of Solana memecoins lose 90%+ of peak market cap within 24 hours, so the median creator earns close to nothing.

How much does pump.fun pay meme coin creators?

0.05% of the token's trading volume, paid in SOL and claimable from the creator dashboard. The program launched May 12, 2025 and applies both on the bonding curve and after graduation to PumpSwap. Per the launch coverage, $10 million of volume pays the creator about $5,000 in SOL. Verify the live rate at pump.fun/docs before launching, since fee schedules change.

How do creators earn from a Raydium liquidity pool?

Seed a CPMM pool, keep the LP tokens, and 84% of every swap fee accrues to your LP position (12% goes to Raydium's protocol treasury, 4% to its fund account). On the 1% fee tier that means 0.84% of volume. The catch: unburned LP reads as rug risk on DexScreener, so holding LP for fee income costs you the trust signal that burning would buy.

Is keeping a creator allocation a rug pull?

Not by itself. The line is disclosure. A creator allocation that is stated publicly before launch and visible on the Solscan Holders tab, then sold gradually, is a legitimate way to get paid. An undisclosed stash dumped into the first liquidity spike is a soft rug, and on-chain forensics make it visible within minutes.

How much volume does it take to earn 10 SOL as a creator?

Hypothetical math, not a projection: at pump.fun's 0.05% reward rate, 10 SOL requires 20,000 SOL of cumulative trading volume (about $4M at SOL=$200). Holding 100% of the LP on a 1% Raydium fee tier gets there in roughly 1,200 SOL of volume, but requires 5-25 SOL of seed capital and unburned LP.

References

1. Pump.fun official documentation: fees and creator rewards
2. CoinDesk: Pump.fun launches SOL revenue sharing for coin creators (May 13, 2025)
3. The Block: PumpSwap introduces revenue sharing for token creators
4. Raydium docs: CPMM trade fees and distribution
5. Raydium docs: creating a CPMM pool and fee tiers
6. Solana docs: core fees, 5,000 lamports per signature
7. SPL Token Program: mint and supply mechanics
8. Metaplex: Token Metadata program
9. BONK mint on Solscan: supply, decimals, Holders tab
10. WIF mint on Solscan: 1B supply, 6 decimals
11. CoinGecko: BONK market data and all-time-high history
12. PumpSwap AMM program on Solana Explorer
13. raydium-sdk: liquidity.ts fee constants
14. DefiLlama: pump.fun protocol fees and volume
15. solana-program-library: SPL Token processor source, mint_to authority check
16. DexScreener: Solana pairs board, liquidity and lock display
17. Birdeye: BONK token dashboard, volume cross-check

You now know where every SOL of creator income actually comes from. If the math points you at a direct launch, create your meme coin with alchemii, seed the pool with the liquidity builder, and make the hold-or-burn call with open eyes.