How the farm works

Overview

An amoeba is a pump.fun coin whose creator is not a person but a vault the farm controls. pump.fun pays creators a slice of every trade; for an amoeba that slice lands in the vault and becomes the coin's food. The farm, an off-chain process that signs for the vaults, turns that food into two things holders can measure: growth, a market buy of the coin on its own curve with every token bought pushed to holders, and feed, SOL pushed to holders' wallets. Around that core runs an hourly ecology. Coins of similar size are matched against each other and the one that trades more takes the other's fees for the round. A coin that keeps beating a much smaller rival engulfs it: it buys the rival with its own pot and hands those tokens to its holders, then drains the rival's fees for a while. A coin nobody buys for a stretch encysts, and its pot goes to feed the coins that are growing. No one has to do anything to be paid; every payout is pushed on chain to the wallets holding the coin at a snapshot.

The rest of this page states each rule precisely, with the constants the farm reads and a worked example wherever numbers matter. Rules are enforced by the farm, not by a program on chain, so this page is the specification.

Launch

Launching an amoeba is one Solana transaction, signed by the launcher's wallet, that the site prepares and the launcher signs. It contains:

1. pump.fun's create_v2 instruction, which mints the coin (Token-2022) and opens its bonding curve. The instruction's creator field is set to a fresh vault address, not the launcher's wallet.
2. Optionally, a buy on that new curve in the same transaction. The launcher chooses the SOL amount; the site quotes the token amount from the curve's initial state. Zero is allowed.

Before the transaction is built, the coin's image and a metadata document are pinned to IPFS. The document carries the name, ticker, description, links, and an amoeba block with the vault address and the chosen metabolism. Its IPFS URI is what create_v2 stores on chain, so the metabolism is public and fixed from the first block the coin exists in.

The vault

A vault is an ordinary Solana keypair derived deterministically: a hash of a domain string, the farm's secret and a random 16-byte salt generated for that launch. The salt is stored on the coin's row and never sent to a browser; the farm's secret never leaves the farm. Anyone can see the vault address (it is the on-chain creator), and only the farm can sign for it. A vault is the amoeba's stomach: fees are collected into it, the pot sits in it, buys are paid from it, and payouts are sent from it.

What the launcher chooses

What the launcher does not get

Creator fees. On a normal pump.fun coin the creator collects them; on an amoeba the creator is the vault, so the launcher has no claim on them and no key to them. The launcher is paid exactly like any other wallet: pro rata to what they hold at each payout snapshot. An initial buy is a holding, nothing more.

Food

pump.fun pays a coin's creator a fee on every trade: on the bonding curve, 30 bps (0.3%) of each buy and each sell, paid in SOL into a creator vault account inside the pump program. After graduation the AMM pays the creator too, but in wrapped SOL into a token account owned by the creator address. The farm reads both: the native balance owed across pump's programs, plus any wrapped SOL sitting in the vault's token account.

Collection

On every pass the farm checks each live coin. When native plus wrapped fees owed reach 0.005 SOL (minClaimSol), it sends one transaction that does all of the following:

1. collects the native creator fees from pump.fun into the vault (if there are any),
2. closes the wrapped-SOL account so its lamports land in the vault as plain SOL (if there was any),
3. transfers the farm fee, 2% of the gross amount (farmFeeBps), from the vault to the farm wallet, which pays gas for everything the farm does,
4. routes the net amount (see below).

The coin's lifetime total_fees_sol increases by the gross amount on every collection, whatever the route. The farm fee is the farm's only income.

The pot and the floor

The pot is the SOL the ledger considers spendable for a coin. It lives in the vault, not in a separate account. When the farm needs to spend from a pot it computes the spendable amount as min(pot, vault balance − 0.003 SOL), never below zero. That 0.003 SOL (vaultFloorSol) stays in every vault so the account keeps its rent exemption and can sign for its own transfers.

Three routes

The net amount of a collection goes to exactly one place, decided at collection time in this order:

If a coin is engulfed but its predator is no longer live, the collection falls through to the pot. A cyst that is also engulfed routes to agar, because the cyst check comes first.

Metabolism, growth and feed

A coin divides when its spendable pot reaches 0.05 SOL (minPotSol). Only alive coins divide; cysts do not. Division spends the whole spendable pot in one pass, split by the coin's metabolism:

• growth = pot × growth_bps / 10,000, rounded to 6 decimals;
• feed = pot − growth.

The snapshot

Before spending, the farm takes a snapshot of every holder of the mint at one confirmed slot, by scanning all Token-2022 accounts for the mint. Balances of the same owner are summed across accounts. Excluded from the snapshot:

• the coin's bonding curve (it holds the unsold supply),
• the coin's own vault,
• the farm wallet,
• any program-derived address (an owner that is not on the ed25519 curve), which covers AMM pools and other program accounts,
• accounts with a zero balance.

Holders are sorted largest first. Payouts consider the top 1,000 holders (maxHoldersPerPayout) and split the amount pro rata to their balances, where the denominator is the sum of those counted balances. If the snapshot is empty, nothing is spent and the pot waits.

Growth

The vault buys the coin on its own bonding curve with the growth amount, quoting from the live curve with 5% slippage tolerance (buySlippagePct). The farm then reads the vault's token balance and pushes it to holders pro rata, skipping any share below 1 token (minGrowthTokens); those slivers stay in the vault. Tokens go in transactions of 12 transfers each. Growth transfers go to each wallet's associated token account and do not create one: every wallet in the snapshot already holds the coin.

Feed

The feed amount is pushed as SOL from the vault to each holder's wallet, pro rata, in transactions of 18 transfers each. Shares below 0.0001 SOL (minFeedSol) are skipped and stay in the pot. If a batch fails, the wallets in it are not paid this time and the ledger records only what landed; the pot is reduced by what landed, so a failed batch's SOL remains for the next division.

After graduation

Once the curve completes, buys have to go through pump.fun's AMM, which the farm does not trade on. So for a graduated coin the growth share is set to zero and the whole pot is feed. The metabolism stays in the metadata; it simply has nothing left to act on. Graduation is one way, so growth does not resume.

Worked example

A coin with metabolism 50% has a spendable pot of 0.06 SOL, above the 0.05 SOL threshold. Filling that pot took 0.06122 SOL of gross fees (the pot is net of the 2% farm fee), which at 0.3% per trade is about 20.41 SOL of trading. Three wallets hold the coin, at 60%, 30% and 10% of the counted supply. Growth is 0.03 SOL, feed is 0.03 SOL. Say the growth buy lands 1,000,000 tokens in the vault.

Every feed share is above 0.0001 SOL and every token share is above 1 token, so all three wallets are paid: one SOL transaction of three transfers and one token transaction of three transfers. The pot returns to zero, divisions and feeds each increase by one, and the two events link to the buy signature and the first feed batch's signature.

The feeding frenzy

Every hour is a round. The farm keys rounds to UTC hours, written like 2026-09-29T14; the site shows them in your local clock. At the top of each hour the farm settles the round that just ended: it ranks the coins, forms matchups, and moves SOL from losers to winners. The hour of trading in between is the feeding frenzy.

Volume is measured from fees

pump.fun pays the creator a fixed rate on every trade, buys and sells alike, so the fees a vault has earned are a meter of the SOL that traded. The farm reads that meter instead of any off-chain volume feed. For each coin it takes cumulative fees = lifetime collected fees + fees currently owed on chain, and computes:

Because it is derived from fees, volume here means SOL traded through the venue that pays the creator: the curve, and the AMM after graduation. A trade that pays no creator fee is invisible to the round.

Pairing

Fighters are the coins that are alive (not cysts) and not currently engulfed. They are sorted by market cap, highest first, using the curve's market cap in SOL, or for graduated coins the AMM market cap converted at the current SOL price. Neighbours pair off: first with second, third with fourth, and so on. With an odd count, the smallest coin sits the round out. Cysts and engulfed coins are not in the list at all.

Settlement

In each matchup the coin with the higher round volume wins. Then:

1. The winner takes min(loser's round fees net of the farm fee, loser's spendable pot), where the loser's round fees are its round volume × 0.003 × (1 − 0.02). The SOL moves from the loser's vault to the winner's vault in one transaction, and the two pots are adjusted by the same amount. If that minimum is zero, no transaction is sent.
2. The winner's wins and the loser's losses each increase by one.
3. Streaks: if the winner's streak_target is already this loser, its streak increases by one; otherwise it becomes 1 and streak_target is set to the loser. The loser's streak resets to 0 and its target is cleared.
4. The engulf conditions are checked immediately (next section).

If both volumes are exactly equal, including when both are zero, the matchup is a tie: no SOL moves, no win or loss is recorded, streaks do not change, and the matchup is stored with no winner.

The pot cap matters. Fees owed on chain count toward volume but are not in the pot until collected, and a loser may have divided or been drained during the round. The transfer can be smaller than the loser's fees, and it can never take more than the loser can spend.

Worked example

A wins. B's round fees net of the farm fee are 0.012 SOL × (1 − 0.02) = 0.01176 SOL. B's ledger pot is 0.009 SOL and its vault holds 0.0125 SOL, so its spendable pot is min(0.009, 0.0125 − 0.003) = 0.009 SOL. The transfer is min(0.01176, 0.009) = 0.009 SOL, vault to vault. A's pot grows by that amount; B's shrinks by it. If A beat B in the previous round too, A's streak against B is now 2.

Engulf

Engulfing is how a big amoeba eats a small one. The check runs right after a matchup settles, for the winner against that matchup's loser, and every condition must hold:

What happens

1. The predator's vault buys the prey on the prey's bonding curve with the spend amount, at 5% slippage tolerance.
2. The farm snapshots the predator's holders (same exclusions as a division) and pushes the prey tokens pro rata to the top 200 of them by balance, skipping shares below 1 token. Most of those wallets have never held the prey, so the farm creates a token account for each one that needs it. Rent (about 0.002 SOL per account) and gas are paid by the farm wallet, in transactions of 6 transfers each.
3. The predator pays the farm back. The farm measures its own wallet balance before and after the hunt; that difference, capped at what the predator can spend after the buy, is transferred from the predator's vault to the farm wallet.
4. For the next 12 hours (engulfHours) the prey is marked engulfed by the predator. Every collection of the prey's fees in that window is routed to the predator's vault and pot (a siphon event).
5. The predator's pot is reduced by the spend and the reimbursement, its hunts counter increases by one, and its streak resets to 0 with no target. It cannot chain a second engulf off the same streak.

Being eaten is a pump

From the prey's side, an engulf is a market buy of its coin with half of a larger coin's pot, at the prey's own curve price, and that SOL stays in the prey's curve. Existing prey holders keep every token they had; the price they hold at goes up at the moment of the buy. The cost is the siphon: for 12 hours the prey's creator fees feed the predator's holders instead of its own pot. The prey's existing pot is untouched and it can divide as usual if that pot is above 0.05 SOL.

What ends it

The siphon expires 12 hours after the engulf. At the first top-of-hour settlement after that, the farm clears the engulfed marker before pairing, so the freed coin is in that round's matchups and can be a predator itself. While engulfed, a coin is not paired and cannot be engulfed again, but it can encyst (its fees then route to agar rather than to the predator), and it remains eligible for agar.

Worked example

Predator P (market cap 7 SOL) beats prey Q (market cap 3 SOL) for the 3rd round running. 7 ≥ 2 × 3, Q is alive, on its curve and free, and P is free. P's spendable pot is 0.08 SOL; the spend is 50% of it, 0.04 SOL, which clears 0.02 SOL. P's vault buys Q with 0.04 SOL. P has 30 holders in its top 200 who do not hold Q, so the farm creates 30 token accounts and pays about 0.062 SOL in rent and gas. P has 0.04 SOL of spendable pot left, so the reimbursement is min(0.062, 0.04) = 0.04 SOL, and P's pot ends at 0 SOL. Q is engulfed for 12 hours; its next collections land in P's vault.

Cyst and agar

Detecting a buy

On every pass the farm reads the coin's bonding curve. If the curve's real SOL reserves are higher than at the last pass, someone bought; the farm records last_buy_at. Sells lower the reserves and do not count. After graduation the curve is frozen, so the farm uses the time of the last trade reported by a market data provider (Birdeye) instead; any trade later than the recorded time counts as a buy.

Encysting

An alive coin with no buy for 6 hours (cystAfterHours), counted from its last recorded buy or, if there has been none, from the moment its launch confirmed, encysts. In one transaction its whole spendable pot is moved from its vault to the farm wallet and added to the agar pool; its state becomes cyst; an encyst event records the amount and the idle hours. A cyst does not divide, is not paired in the frenzy, cannot be engulfed, and every fee collection it triggers is routed to agar.

Waking

The next detected buy wakes it: state returns to alive and a wake event is recorded. Its fees are its own again from the next collection, and it is paired in the next round. Its pot starts from whatever was left after encysting, usually nothing; the SOL that went to agar does not come back.

Agar

Agar is the farm-wide pool of SOL from cysts, held in the farm wallet and tracked in the farm row. At each top-of-hour settlement, after the matchups, the farm pays it out when:

• the pool holds at least 0.02 SOL (minAgarSol), and
• the budget, min(pool, farm wallet balance − 0.02 SOL), is also at least 0.02 SOL.

The budget goes to the top 3 alive coins by round volume that had any volume, split 50% / 30% / 20% (agarSplit). If fewer than 3 qualify, the weights of the present ranks are renormalised over those coins. Each share is pushed from the farm wallet as SOL to that coin's holders, pro rata, with the same snapshot rules, top-1,000 cap and 0.0001 SOL minimum as a feed. An agar event per coin records the rank and what landed; the coin's total_fed_sol rises by it and the pool falls by the total paid. Engulfed coins are eligible; cysts are not.

Timeline of a round

The farm runs in passes, one about every 30 seconds, processing up to four coins at a time. The hourly settlement runs inside the first pass whose UTC hour differs from the last settled hour, so a round settles within a pass or two of the top of the hour. If the farm is down at the top of the hour, the round settles on its first pass back, with volume measured from fees since the last settlement.

At the top of the hour, once

1. Heartbeat. The farm row's updated_at is touched on every pass; the site shows the round as open only while it is fresh.
2. Expired engulfs cleared. Any coin whose siphon window has passed is freed before pairing.
3. Ranking. For every live coin: cumulative fees, round volume and market cap.
4. Matchups. Alive, free coins sorted by market cap and paired by neighbour; each matchup settles in turn, largest pair first, moving SOL and updating wins, losses and streaks.
5. Engulf checks. Immediately after each matchup, for its winner.
6. Agar. Paid to the round's top 3 by volume, if the pool and budget allow.
7. Meters reset. Each coin's fees_hour_start is set to its cumulative fees now and hour_volume_sol to the round's volume; the farm row records the hour as settled.

Every pass, for every live coin

1. Tick. Read the curve; note a buy; mark graduation; wake a cyst on a buy; encyst an alive coin that has been idle 6 hours. A wake or an encyst ends the coin's pass.
2. Collect. If fees owed reach 0.005 SOL: collect, take the farm fee, route to pot, predator or agar.
3. Grow. If the coin is alive and its spendable pot reaches 0.05 SOL: snapshot, growth buy and token push, feed push.

Each step re-reads the coin's row before acting, so a collection in step 2 is visible to the division in step 3 of the same pass. A coin can therefore collect and divide within seconds of each other.

Data and transparency

Every action the farm takes is a Solana transaction with a public signature, and every action is written to a ledger the site reads. Five tables:

The vault's salt is stored on the coin row but is never returned by the public API; a coin is public only once its launch transaction has confirmed. Anyone can verify a payout by opening its signature in an explorer: the transfer from the vault (or the farm wallet, for agar) to the wallet is right there.

Your wallet

The wallet page lists every payout pushed to the connected wallet, newest first, with the coin, the kind, the amount and the signature. It reads the payouts table, so it shows exactly what landed.

Event kinds

Risks and honest caveats

This is an experiment in making coins behave like organisms. Read this part twice.

• The farm has custody of the vaults. Each coin's creator vault is a key derived from the farm's secret. If that secret is lost, the pots are lost; if it is stolen, so are they. Nothing about the pot is trustless. The trust is that the farm runs the rules on this page, and every transaction it sends is public so that can be checked.
• Market buys have slippage and move the price. Growth and engulf are real buys on a real bonding curve, with up to 5% slippage tolerance. On a thin curve a buy pays well above the quoted price, and the tokens pushed to holders can be worth less than the SOL spent.
• Pushed tokens can be sold. A growth buy raises the price at the moment it lands. Anyone who receives tokens can sell them straight away, including the largest holders, who receive the largest shares.
• Winning a round can be bought. Volume is measured from fees, so trading with yourself raises your volume. It costs 0.3% per trade in creator fees (which come back to the pot, minus the 2% farm fee) plus pump.fun's own fees and gas. Whether that is worth what a rival's round fees are is arithmetic, not a rule.
• Small holders are skipped. Payouts stop at the largest 1,000 holders (top 200 for prey tokens) and below 0.0001 SOL or 1 token per wallet. A very small holder can go many divisions without receiving one.
• Settlement is hourly and the farm runs in passes. Matchups, engulfs and agar settle at the top of the hour; cysts and divisions happen on any pass. A coin can be encysted or eaten before anyone reacts, and there is no appeal.
• Graduation changes the rules. Once a coin graduates, the farm cannot buy it: growth becomes feed, it cannot be engulfed, and buys are detected from a market data provider rather than from the curve.
• Engulfing costs the predator rent. Creating token accounts for the predator's holders is paid from the predator's pot, up to everything it has left after the buy.
• This is pump.fun. Every risk of a pump.fun coin applies. The farm adds a layer of rules on top; it removes none of them.
• If the farm is offline, nothing settles. No collections, no divisions, no matchups, no agar. Fees keep accruing on chain and are collected when it returns; the missed hours settle as one round.

FAQ

Glossary

Amoeba

A pump.fun coin whose on-chain creator is a farm-controlled vault.

Vault

The per-coin keypair that receives creator fees, holds the pot and signs buys and payouts. Derived from the farm's secret and a per-coin salt.

The farm

The off-chain process that collects fees, runs divisions, settles rounds, engulfs, encysts and pays agar. It pays gas from a farm wallet funded by the farm fee.

Farm fee

2% of every collection, sent to the farm wallet for gas.

Pot

The SOL a coin can spend, held in its vault above the 0.003 SOL floor.

Metabolism

The share of every pot that becomes growth, chosen at launch as growth_bps; the rest is feed.

Division

Spending a full pot (0.05 SOL or more): a growth buy plus a feed push.

Growth

A market buy of the coin on its own curve, with every token bought pushed to holders pro rata.

Feed

SOL pushed pro rata from the pot to holders' wallets.

Snapshot

The set of holders and balances at one slot, excluding the curve, the vault, the farm wallet and program-owned addresses.

Round

One UTC hour of trading, settled at the top of the next hour.

Feeding frenzy

The hourly contest: coins are ranked by market cap, paired with their neighbour, and the higher round volume wins the loser's round fees.

Matchup

One pairing in a round, with its two volumes, its winner and the SOL moved.

Round volume

Fees earned during the round divided by 0.003: the SOL that traded, as metered by creator fees.

Streak

Consecutive rounds a coin has beaten the same rival. Resets on a loss, on a pairing against anyone else, or after an engulf.

Engulf

A predator with a 3-round streak and 2× the market cap buys the prey with 50% of its pot, pushes the prey tokens to its holders, and siphons the prey's fees for 12 hours.

Siphon

A prey's fee collection routed to its predator's vault during the engulf window.

Cyst

A coin with no buy for 6 hours. Its pot goes to agar; it sits out the frenzy until a buy wakes it.

Agar

The farm-wide pool of SOL from cysts, paid each round (when at least 0.02 SOL) to the top 3 coins by volume, split 50% / 30% / 20%, as feed to their holders.

Graduation

The curve completing and the coin migrating to pump.fun's AMM. After it, growth becomes feed and the coin cannot be engulfed.

Pass

One loop of the farm, about every 30 seconds: the hourly settlement if due, then tick, collect and grow for every live coin.