$POP

Graduation

Graduation is the moment a launch stops being a bonding curve and becomes a real, permanently liquid market. On most launchpads this is the riskiest step in the whole lifecycle. Here it is deliberately boring, and the reason is worth understanding.

Why it is not risky here

The usual graduation has to convert: the curve collected one asset, the pool needs another, so somewhere in the middle there is a swap. A swap needs a price. A price needs an oracle or a router, and both can be manipulated by whoever is watching for exactly this moment.

A $POP curve collects the quote token from the very first trade, the same token its pool will be paired with. So at graduation there is nothing to convert. No swap, no router, no oracle, no slippage parameter, nothing to front-run. The curve hands over exactly what the pool needs.

What happens, in order

  1. The threshold is crossed. A buy takes the curve's sellable allocation to zero. That same transaction attempts graduation automatically.
  2. Phase one: the curve is drained. Outstanding fees are swept, trading halts permanently, and the collected quote plus the remaining tokens move to the factory.
  3. Phase two: the pool is seeded. A Uniswap V4 pool is created at exactly the curve's final price, and a full-range liquidity position is minted directly into the locker. Not to us and then transferred, but minted straight there, so there is never a block in which anyone could have taken it.

Both phases are permissionless

The crossing buy tries to do this atomically, but wallets do not account for that extra work when estimating gas, so sometimes it runs out. That is fine and expected: anyone can complete either phase afterwards, and it stays retryable forever. A keeper does it within seconds; if the keeper vanished, any holder could do it themselves.

Nothing is ever stuck waiting on us.

What gets locked

  • The entire liquidity position. The NFT representing it lives in a contract with no withdrawal function, no transfer function, and no arbitrary-call function. Not time-locked. There is simply no code path out.
  • The supply that could not enter the pool. The curve prices against a virtual reserve; the portion of supply corresponding to it would lower the pool's opening price if it were added. It is locked instead of circulating, roughly 8% of supply on standard terms.

After graduation

The token trades in a normal V4 pool. Fees keep working exactly as before: same total, same split, same cashback mode, collected by the hook instead of the curve. Creator revenue and holder rewards continue for the life of the pool.

The one behavioural difference is the trader-rebate mode, which cannot identify the human trader through a router and so reverts to the creator. See fees.

If a quote token turns hostile

A quote token that changes behaviour after listing, by starting to tax transfers or blocklisting an address the protocol needs, can make the seeding step impossible. For that case there is a rescue path, and it is bounded on every axis: it can only pay the launch's own creator, never an address anyone picks; it only unlocks after 14 days; and during the entire wait anyone can still complete the graduation normally and end the window permanently. It exists so funds cannot be bricked, not so anyone can take them.

Something unclear or wrong? The contracts are the source of truth, and every claim here is checkable on /proof.