Trading and pricing

A token trades in a Uniswap V4 pool from the moment it launches. There is no bonding curve, no waiting to be listed, and no separate phase to get through first. The pool is the token's venue for life.

There is no order book and no counterparty. You swap against the pool, and the price moves with every trade.

Where the price comes from

At launch the pool is seeded one-sided: the token goes in, and nothing else does. There is no ETH on the other side until someone buys.

That has two consequences worth understanding before you trade.

Buying walks the price up. Every buy takes tokens out of the pool and leaves ETH behind, so the next buyer pays more. The price starts at a floor set at launch and rises from there. Nobody sets the price; the pool's own maths does.

The sell side is funded by earlier buying. The ETH you get when you sell is ETH that earlier buyers put in. Very early on there is little of it, so an early holder trying to exit a large position will move the price a long way down. This is the honest shape of a fresh launch, not a defect.

The words on the page

Price. What one token costs right now, at the pool's current price.

Market cap. Price multiplied by circulating supply.

FDV. Price multiplied by the full token supply.

Pool reserves. What the pool is currently holding on each side. The token side starts full and falls as people buy; the ETH side starts empty and grows.

Price impact. How far your own trade moves the price. Bigger trades move it further, so the last token you buy costs more than the first.

Slippage. The most price movement you will accept between pressing the button and the transaction landing. If the price moves more than that, the trade reverts instead of filling at a worse price.

Buying

Open any token and use the Buy side of the panel on the right. You can buy two ways.

By ETH amount. Enter the ETH you want to spend, or use the shortcuts. Your balance is shown above the field and turns red if you enter more than you have.

By token amount. Switch the unit and type the number of tokens you want.

You receive shows the live quote. Min received shows the worst outcome your slippage setting allows, and that number is what the contract actually enforces. The panel also shows what share of total supply your buy represents.

Default slippage is 1%. Change it from the settings pill next to the Buy/Sell switch. Presets are 0.5%, 1% and 3%, or type your own between 0.1 and 100.

Selling

Switch to Sell. Enter a token amount or use the 25%, 50%, 75% and Max shortcuts.

Selling takes two transactions the first time: an approval that lets the contract move that token on your behalf, then the sell itself. The app runs them back to back, so the button reads Approve, then continues into the sell once the approval confirms. Later sells of the same token need only one.

The opening window

For the first couple of blocks after a launch, in practice something like half a minute, buying is restricted:

• In the launch block, only the creator's buy goes through. Everyone else's reverts.
• For the rest of the window, no wallet may hold more than 5% of supply or buy more than 5.5% of supply cumulatively. The creator is capped too, by the same rules.
• After the window the limits are gone permanently.

Selling and wallet-to-wallet transfers are never restricted, at any point.

If a buy in the first moments of a launch reverts, this is almost always why. Wait a few seconds and try a smaller amount.

Trading does not need an account

A connected wallet is enough. You do not need to sign in to buy or sell.

When a trade fails

Common reasons, in plain terms:

• Rejected in your wallet. You dismissed the confirmation. Nothing happened.
• Slippage check failed. The price moved more than your tolerance while the transaction was pending. Retry, or raise slippage slightly.
• Blocked at launch. You tried to buy inside the opening window and hit the anti-snipe cap, or you were not the creator in the launch block.
• Not enough ETH. Remember gas as well as the trade amount.

There is no longer any window where trading stops. Older launchpad designs, including an earlier version of this one, paused buys and sells while a token moved from a curve into a pool. A token launched into its pool has nothing to move into, so that gap is gone.

A cost worth internalising

On an Auto-Burn or Standard token every trade takes 1%. Buying and immediately selling always loses money, no matter which way the price moved in between. The round trip is not free.

That 1% is the pool's own swap fee — the ordinary fee any Uniswap pool charges, set when the token launched. Nothing extra is skimmed off your trade on the way past. It reaches the creator, the burn and the treasury because Honkfun is the pool's only liquidity provider and always will be, so everything the pool collects accrues to that one locked position. See Fees and burns.

A Tax-Free token takes nothing on either side. See Fees and burns for what that means for the creator.