What One Round Trip Really Costs

Few people trade on pump.fun's own page. They use a terminal - a faster screen that shows new coins, coins about to graduate, and coins that just did, with one-click buying and labels on known wallets. Axiom and GMGN are the largest; Photon and BullX are older names. Terminals add roughly 1% per trade on top of pump.fun's fee: Axiom's own documentation lists its net rate from 0.95% at the entry tier down to 0.75% at the top; GMGN, BullX and Photon each document 1%.

Two things about terminals matter more than the fee. First, custody. A web terminal asks your own wallet to sign each trade. A Telegram trading bot usually creates a wallet for you and holds its private key, which means the bot's operator - or anyone who breaches it - can move your funds. Only keep in a bot what you could lose tonight. Second, the referral scheme behind the well-known traders, which the next lesson covers.

Here is the floor on one round trip (buy and sell once), using only the published rates above - no slippage, no Solana priority fees, no tip to land the trade fast. On a coin minutes old, slippage alone can be larger than everything in this table.

Trading through a terminal on pump.fun's bonding curve: 4.40% total fee, $22.00 on a $500 round trip, and the coin needs to rise about 4.5% just to break even. Trading a large graduated coin on PumpSwap through the same terminal: 2.50% total, $12.50 on $500, about 2.5% to break even. BingX spot at the standard rate: 0.20% total, $1.00 on $500, about 0.2% to break even. BingX spot registered through RebateMax's link: 0.10% total, $0.50 on $500, about 0.1% to break even - that is the standard 50% fee discount applied to spot trading.

At thirty $500 round trips a week on the bonding curve, that is $660 a week in fees before a single coin has moved. We do not have a verified LBank spot rate to print here, so none is given; the LBank numbers we can state are for perpetual futures, a different market, covered elsewhere in this Academy. An exchange is not a cheaper version of the on-chain trade - it is a different product, which the final lesson in this course covers.