Answer
What do buyers check before buying a memecoin?
Buyers check five things — mint and freeze authorities, holder concentration, the first transactions, liquidity depth and whether the socials are real — and most coins still go to zero anyway.
The contract checks
First the mint. On a standard pump.fun launch the mint, freeze and update authorities are null from the first block, supply is fixed and the metadata cannot be changed, so there is nothing for the creator to switch on later. If a token still has a freeze authority, a buyer cannot rule out a freeze; if it still has a mint authority, supply is not fixed, whatever the chart says.
- Mint authority null — otherwise supply can be inflated at will.
- Freeze authority null — otherwise your tokens can be frozen in place.
- Update authority null — otherwise the name and image can be rewritten.
- Creator fees: two vaults collected by two instructions, so check what the dev keeps taking.
The people checks
Then the holder list. One wallet holding a large share of supply is a sell order waiting to happen, and so are twenty wallets funded from one address. Buyers read the first transactions to see whether the dev bought before anyone else, whether buys were bundled into the same block, and whether early wallets have already been selling into later buyers.
Liquidity and socials come last. On the curve, depth depends on how far along the coin is; graduation happens at 85.0054 SOL raised, roughly a 410.88 SOL market cap, about $38.6k at SOL $93.96, and it is automatic, irreversible and the LP is burned. A Telegram channel is the social signal that moves graduation most: 1.485% with one against 0.166% without.
- Check the deployer wallet for a history of previous launches.
- Check whether top holders bought at the same second, from the same funder.
What the odds actually are
The checks narrow the field; they do not change the base rate. Of 832,941 launches between May and June 2026, 1,651 graduated — 0.198%. 68.67% of coins last traded on the day they were created, 80.37% were dead within a day, and 4.55% were still alive at 90 days, some 18.67 million tokens. About 33,676 coins launch every day.
Knowing that, the checks are about avoiding the subset that loses everything for a reason you could have seen, not about finding one that goes up. Nobody can promise that.
- Graduation is not profit for a late buyer; it is a liquidity event.
- Survivorship at 90 days of 4.55% is the number to keep in view.
Related questions
How do I check authorities quickly?
Open the mint address on a Solana explorer and read the account page. Null means the authority has been revoked; a visible address means it has not.
Are bundled buys always a bad sign?
They mean one funder took a large position at the start, which is concentration risk rather than proof of fraud, but it is the first thing to price in.
Does a big Telegram following make a coin safer?
No. It correlates with graduation, not with the price after you buy, and most coins still go to zero.
Where to go next
- What is a honeypot token?
- How do I avoid wallet drainers?
- The full launch guide: costs, socials, 21-day runway
- Every question we have answered
If the brand and the page are what is stopping you
Mint a Brand draws the icon, banner and stickers, builds the token site on its own subdomain and prepares the launch for your wallet to sign, for $30. Your wallet pays the network fee and is the creator of record.
Sources
- Pump.fun docs: creating a coin
- CoinGecko research: average lifespan of pump.fun tokens
- arXiv: empirical study of pump.fun launches
Checked 2026-10-31 · nothing here is financial advice, and most meme coins go to zero.