On Pump.fun, King of the Hill was the top slot on the front page, announced by Pump.fun in February 2024 for whichever coin climbed to about $30k of market cap and held it. It sat on the bonding curve well before graduation. Today Pump.fun doesn't document King of the Hill or any front page ranking, so treat old rules of thumb as history, not a guarantee.
Key points
- The only primary source is a Pump.fun post on X from February 2024 describing about $30k market cap as the bar for the King of the Hill spot.
- Pump.fun's current docs and FAQ say nothing about King of the Hill or how trending lists are ranked.
- Market cap on the curve rises only with net buying, so any market cap threshold is really a curve progress threshold.
- Running the published constants ourselves, the curve completes near 410 SOL of market cap once about 85 SOL has gone in.
- Dollar thresholds move with the SOL price. Count in SOL when you plan.
Where did King of the Hill come from?
In February 2024, a few weeks into Pump.fun's life, the team posted on X that a coin reaching about $30k of market cap would take the King of the Hill spot at the top of the front page. You can read the original announcement yourself. It was simple and a bit gamey: one coin wears the crown until another one climbs past it.
It caught on fast. Creators started talking about "hitting KOTH" as a milestone in its own right, somewhere between launch and graduation, and a whole layer of advice grew up around how to get there first.
Then the site kept changing. Most guides skip this part.
Why did it work so well as a hook? Because it gave a meme coin something to aim for that wasn't the moon. A creator with 3 SOL and a decent Telegram group could plausibly get there in an afternoon, take a screenshot of the crown and post it everywhere, and that screenshot pulled in a second wave of buyers who'd never have found the coin otherwise. We still meet creators who measure launch day by it, two and a half years later, even though the page they're picturing no longer looks the way it did.
What does Pump.fun document today?
Open the Pump.fun FAQ and you'll find coin creation, fees and the bonding curve. You won't find King of the Hill. You won't find a description of how the trending row, the featured spots or any sorted list on the front page gets built either. The February 2024 post remains the only public statement about a front page ranking, and it describes a page that has since been redesigned more than once.
So when someone tells you the exact market cap that wins the crown in 2026, ask them for a source. If they can't link one, they're repeating forum lore.
King of the hill pump fun and curve progress
Why is a market cap target really a curve target? Pump.fun prices coins on a constant-product curve seeded with a virtual reserve of 30 SOL against roughly 1.073 billion virtual tokens, per the bonding curve docs and the program README. Out of a 1 billion supply, 793.1 million tokens are sold on the curve. Price only rises when net SOL flows in, so a given market cap always corresponds to a specific point on that curve.
We ran the numbers. These come from the published constants by our own arithmetic, not from a Pump.fun table, and they ignore fees.
| Market cap | Net SOL in the curve | Curve tokens sold |
|---|---|---|
| About 28 SOL | 0 SOL (launch) | 0% |
| 100 SOL | About 26.7 SOL | About 64% |
| 150 SOL | About 39.5 SOL | About 77% |
| 200 SOL | About 50.2 SOL | About 85% |
| 300 SOL | About 68.3 SOL | About 94% |
| About 410 SOL | About 85 SOL | 100% (curve complete) |
Now put $30k next to it. At $150 per SOL that's 200 SOL of market cap, which by our math means roughly 85% of the curve tokens are already sold. At $200 per SOL it's 150 SOL, around 77%. At $100 it's 300 SOL, almost at the finish. In people's heads the dollar figure stayed fixed while the SOL price, and possibly the curve parameters of early 2024, moved underneath it.
Notice something else in that table. Token share climbs much faster than the SOL raised, because early buys get far more tokens per SOL. A progress bar based on tokens and one based on SOL would show quite different numbers for the same coin, so don't panic if a third-party tool disagrees with what you see on the coin page.
Once real token reserves run out, the curve marks itself complete and liquidity migrates to PumpSwap automatically. Pump.fun lists a 0.015 SOL fee for that step. The graduation guide covers that step, and the full curve walkthrough lives on our bonding curve page.
What does the front page look like now?
Today's front page leans on trending and featured lists. Pump.fun hasn't said how those are ranked. Watching it day after day, we notice the coins up there usually have trades landing every few seconds, lots of different wallets in the trades tab, a chart still pointing up, people posting in the thread and, now and then, a creator live on stream. Those are observations. We can't tell you the weights, and nobody outside the company can either.
One more thing changed. In early 2024 there were far fewer launches per hour, and a single top slot could stay with one coin for a good while. With many more coins competing now, any visible spot turns over faster.
For more on those signals, plus an order of operations for launch day, read how to trend on Pump.fun.
How do you push toward the top of the page?
Think of it as two jobs. One is net buying, which is the only thing that moves market cap along the curve. The other is visible activity from many people, which is what visitors and probably the ranking look at.
Set a SOL target, not a dollar one
Check the SOL price on launch day and turn any market cap goal into SOL. Then read the table above to see how much net SOL that implies.
Bring your own buyers first
A community that buys in the first minutes is the cheapest net buying you will ever get, and it is the kind nobody questions.
Add spread-out activity
Trades from hundreds of different wallets make the trades tab look like a crowd. Make sure buys outweigh sells overall, or the chart just churns sideways.
Fill the page
A real image, a description, working links and a thread with genuine posts. Visitors decide in seconds.
Watch and adjust
Look at the page every 15 minutes. If trades slow down, raise the pace instead of dumping a big buy all at once.
Where do we fit? Our volume tool for Pump.fun coins handles the activity part. Each run spreads trades over 500 up to 10,000 fresh wallets, sends through Jito bundles and can be paced over as little as 15 minutes or as long as 10 hours. If the coin graduates halfway through, trading simply moves on to the canonical PumpSwap pool. Extras are optional: replies, favorites, follows of the creator, feed bumps. Holder retention lets 20 to 80% of the wallets hold on to a little of the token after the run, so your holder count doesn't fall off a cliff overnight.
You pay 1% of the volume you target, never less than a 100 SOL target, and it already includes the trading charges Pump.fun and PumpSwap take, network costs and Jito tips, with nothing billed on top. A 300 SOL run costs 3 SOL. Payment goes to a deposit address the console shows you; you never connect a wallet.
Common myths about the crown
A few claims keep coming back in Telegram groups, and none of them hold up against the sources.
| Claim | What we can actually check |
|---|---|
| "KOTH is always at $30k" | That figure comes from one post in February 2024, priced in dollars, under a SOL price and front page that have both changed since. |
| "KOTH means you are about to graduate" | By our math a coin at 200 SOL of market cap still has roughly 35 SOL of net buying to go before the curve completes. |
| "Bumps win the crown" | Tiny repeated buys barely move market cap. Net SOL flowing into the curve is what moves it. |
| "Pump.fun publishes the ranking" | The docs and FAQ cover fees and the curve. Front page ordering is not described anywhere public. |
The second row surprises people most. Going from 200 SOL to roughly 410 SOL of market cap takes about 35 more SOL of net buying under today's constants, and that last stretch is often where coins stall, because early holders start taking profit just as the price gets interesting. Plan for it instead of assuming the top slot carries you over the line.
Realistic expectations
Volume isn't net buying. A run can trade 300 SOL back and forth and leave the market cap close to where it started, because buys and sells cancel out. If the coin climbs, it's because buyers outweighed sellers, and the most durable buyers are people who actually like the coin.
No tool can promise the top slot. Not us, not anyone. Ranking rules are private, they change, and every other creator online at that moment is trying for the same rows.
What you can control is whether the page is worth landing on. Plenty of coins touched a visible spot for a few minutes and still died, because the people who clicked through saw 14 holders and an empty thread.
Mind the local rules too. Each country sets its own approach to promoting tokens, and we aren't giving legal advice here, so check where you live if you're not sure. Each swap in a run is a regular Solana transaction from one of many wallets, at varied sizes and times, much like a crowd of separate traders. We never ask for your keys, a signature or a wallet connection. We're not affiliated with Pump.fun.
Quick answers
What market cap did a coin need to become King of the Hill?
Pump.fun's February 2024 post put it at about $30k. Pump.fun has not published a current figure, and the front page now relies on trending and featured lists with unpublished rules.
Does King of the Hill still exist?
Pump.fun's docs and FAQ do not mention it. Creators still use the term, but we cannot confirm any current crown rule, so treat it as history.
Does King of the Hill mean the coin graduated?
No. Graduation happens when the curve sells its last real tokens, near 410 SOL of market cap by our arithmetic, and liquidity moves to PumpSwap. The $30k mark from 2024 sat earlier on the curve.
How much SOL does it take to reach a given market cap?
Under today's constants, about 26.7 SOL of net buying reaches 100 SOL of market cap and about 50 SOL reaches 200 SOL, ignoring fees. Those are our own calculations from the published numbers.
Can a volume bot get my coin King of the Hill?
It can add trades and a large number of distinct wallets, both common on coins near the top. It cannot guarantee a ranking Pump.fun does not publish, and churned volume does not raise market cap without net buying.
Why do different sites show different curve progress?
Some count tokens sold and some count SOL raised. Early buys get many more tokens per SOL, so a token-based bar runs well ahead of a SOL-based one for the same coin.
Put this into practice
Drop your mint into the console, set wallets and volume, and the fee is shown before anything is sent. One flat 1% of the goal, no wallet link required.
We operate the volume runs sold through the console and revise these pages whenever Pump.fun changes its curve, feed or PumpSwap rules. Found a stale number? Tell us at support@softatjeh.com.