Three out of four launches on pump.fun never reach a $5,000 market cap. That is the bottom rung of the ladder, the lowest one we track, and 1,846 of 2,471 traced launches never put a foot on it. Not at minute one, not at hour six. Never.
Now look at the top of the same ladder. Once a launch clears any rung, the odds it clears the next one sit between 60 and 75 percent. The filter on this ladder is not up there. It is at the bottom.
The ladder, measured
These are 2,471 launches the live board caught on pump.fun, each traced across its first six hours. “Reached” means the highest market cap recorded in the trace touched the amount. Not held it. Touched it.
| Ever reached | Launches | Share |
|---|---|---|
| $5,000 | 625 | 25% |
| $10,000 | 380 | 15% |
| $25,000 | 239 | 10% |
| $50,000 | 164 | 7% |
| $100,000 | 121 | 5% |
| $500,000 | 73 | 3% |
| $1,000,000 | 55 | 2% |
The absolute numbers thin out fast, but the rungs get further apart as they climb. Doubling from $50,000 to $100,000 is not the same jump as doubling from $5,000 to $10,000 in dollar terms, yet survival holds roughly steady. Read the ladder conditionally and the shape shows up.
| Survivor group | Also cleared the next rung |
|---|---|
| Reached $5,000 | 61% reached $10,000 |
| Reached $10,000 | 63% reached $25,000 |
| Reached $25,000 | 69% reached $50,000 |
| Reached $50,000 | 74% reached $100,000 |
| Reached $100,000 | 60% reached $500,000 |
| Reached $500,000 | 75% reached $1,000,000 |
Worth noticing which rung is the weakest. The $100,000 to $500,000 step is a fivefold climb, the widest gap on the ladder, and it still keeps 6 in 10 of the coins that show up. The $5,000 to $10,000 step is a twofold climb and it loses more, 39 of every 100. On this record, the cheap part of a launch is the dangerous part, not the expensive part.
No rung on this ladder kills more than about four in ten of the coins that arrive at it. The killer step is the one before the ladder starts: getting from a $2,900 median launch to $5,000 at all.
What that means on the board
A launch sitting at $3,000 is not an early version of a $100,000 coin waiting to happen. Of the 625 launches that did reach $5,000, only 121 ever reached $100,000 inside the trace. That is 19%. The bottom rung is crowded and most of the crowd goes no further.
Climbing does not mean staying. The 121 launches that touched $100,000 made their high inside the first hour 103 times, 85%. For the $10,000 club it is even earlier: 69% of those 380 launches peaked within five minutes. Reaching a rung and holding a rung are different achievements, and the first hour record covered the timing half of that already.
So the numbers here are touch rates, not success rates. A card showing $80,000 right now tells you the launch once traded near that. The pool checker exists for exactly that gap between what a card claims and what the pool behind it does.
Two more things the record says without a forecast attached. First, the median traced launch starts at about $2,936 and ends six hours at $2,754, so a launch that never climbs is not a failure of nerve. It is the median outcome. Second, even the cheapest rung has a toll: leaving a median launch with a $500 bag costs about 10% of it, as the exit cost record measured. The ladder starts taking a cut before the first rung exists.
Samples, stated plainly
The 2% that reached $1,000,000 is 55 launches. The 3% at $500,000 is 73. Any sentence about the top of this ladder is a sentence about dozens, not thousands. The bottom rung has 625 and is the only rung with a crowd on it.
The conditional rungs shrink even faster. The 61% who climb from $5,000 to $10,000 is 380 out of 625. The 75% who climb from $500,000 to $1,000,000 is 55 out of 73. One coin either way moves that top figure by more than a point.
Method
Source is launch_corpus.jsonl, the board’s own launch record. 4,659 launches observed, 2,471 traced with at least four price prints inside six hours; the ladder above uses only the traced set. “Reached” is the maximum market cap in the trace crossing the amount at least once. The window ends at hour six, so a launch that climbed on day two counts as never reaching anything here. The traced set excludes launches that left fewer than four prints, and if that drops anyone, it drops the ones that died fastest, which would make the ladder look better than reality, not worse. A few corrupt records with impossible values remain in the corpus; at these rung counts they are single coins and move nothing.
