RHEA — Launching is solved. Liquidity is next.

The liquidity thesis

The same coin makes a splash in shallow liquidity and only a small ripple in deep liquidity.

IlliquidThin liquidity · large price impact

LiquidDeep liquidity · smaller price impact

Part one · The problem

the coins this is about

logo via DexScreener

I. Liquid launches, illiquid coins.

Launching a coin takes seconds. Holding one is a different story. Most memecoins trade on pools so thin that a single wallet can move the chart, every buyer pays for it in slippage, and the first real seller sets the top.

The meme was never the weak link. The market under it was. Attention arrives, finds no depth to land on, and leaves as a wick. Traders have learned the lesson: buy fast, sell faster, never hold. That reflex is what kills coins, and it is a rational response to illiquidity.

Fig. 1 — What a thin pool looks like — $BONK/SOL, Orca

A pool worth about $0.40M (~984 SOL) still prints a −34% high-to-low session. The thinner the pool, the harder ordinary flow hits the chart.

$BONKlogo via DexScreener−34% HIGH-TO-LOW · 2026-04-30

Up · close above openDown · close below open

Unit · daily candles · price in USDSource · GeckoTerminal OHLCV · DexScreener · fetched 2026-10-07

Real daily OHLCV, 2026-04-10 → 2026-05-23. GeckoTerminal public data reaches back 180 days; this is the most violent session in that window, not launch-era history.

II. Depth is the ceiling.

Price impact is arithmetic. A 5 SOL buy moves a 20 SOL pool by 20%. The same buy moves a 250 SOL pool by 2%. A shallow pool converts ordinary flow into violence; a deep one converts it into a chart people can hold.⁴

Fig. 2 — The same 5 SOL buy, different coin

One 5 SOL order barely tilts a deep pool and detonates a shallow one. Price impact = b / (R + b), where R is the pool's SOL reserve.

Swipe or scroll sideways to compare all five pools →

$WIFRaydium

0.018%

move on a 5 SOL buy

Pool depth: $6.5M
SOL reserve: 27,890
Market cap: $228.9M

$POPCATRaydium

0.030%

move on a 5 SOL buy

Pool depth: $3.9M
SOL reserve: 16,592
Market cap: $47.3M

$BONKOrca

0.505%

move on a 5 SOL buy

Pool depth: $396K
SOL reserve: 984
Market cap: $302.4M

A pool at 20 SOLreference depth

20.00%

move on a 5 SOL buy

Pool depth: 20 SOL
Identity: none
Source: computed

A pool at 85 SOLreference depth

5.56%

move on a 5 SOL buy

Pool depth: 85 SOL
Identity: none
Source: computed

Unit · price impact of a single buy · saved pool snapshotSource · DexScreener pool reserves · fetched 2026-10-07 · SOL ≈ $116.32

Single-sided constant-product estimate before fees and tick rounding. logo via DexScreener. Reference depths carry no coin identity.

Part two · How we got here

III. Launching is solved.

pump.fun made launching free, instant and fair. Anyone can create a coin, the bonding curve discovers the price, graduation to a real pool is automatic, and fee sharing turns a creator's cut into a programmable stream. It is the best distribution machine crypto has built, and Rhea is built entirely on top of it.

IV. Depth is not.

Liquidity was never the launchpad's job. Before graduation there is no pool at all: the curve is a formula. After graduation, depth starts from the migration seed and only grows if someone adds to it. On PumpSwap's lowest tier, under 420 SOL of market cap, 0.02% of each trade reaches the pool.

It wasn't always like this. In 2024, AMM pools kept most of their fees: Raydium returned 92.8% of its fees to liquidity that year. Every trade made the market a little deeper. That compounding is what let the great runners absorb their own volatility. On today's rails it no longer happens by default.¹²³

Fig. 3 — Depth that held — $WIF/SOL, Raydium

Behind this chart sits ~$6.48M (~27,890 SOL) of pool depth. Big days still happen, but the market absorbs them into a range instead of a wick.

$WIFlogo via DexScreenerrange held · 183 days

Up · close above openDown · close below open

Unit · daily candles · price in USDSource · GeckoTerminal OHLCV · DexScreener · fetched 2026-10-07

Real daily OHLCV, 2026-04-08 → 2026-10-07 (the 180-day window GeckoTerminal's public API exposes). Depth figure is the pool's current liquidity.

Part three · Rhea

V. The fee you control.

Every pump.fun trade pays the coin's creator a fee: 0.30% on the curve, then tiered on PumpSwap by market cap, from 0.95% down to 0.05%. It is the one fee stream a launcher actually owns, and it is usually withdrawn to a wallet. Rhea routes 90% of it back into the coin's own market and 10% to a common pool.¹

Fig. 4 — Where 1.25% goes

Of every $100K traded on the curve, 0 reaches the pool by design; on PumpSwap's lowest tier (under 420 SOL of market cap), $20 does.

Protocol feeCreator feeInto the pool

Bonding curve

$950

$300

PumpSwap tier 1

$930

$300

$20

Raydium 2024

$30

$220

Unit · USD per $100K volumeSource · pump.fun help center (2026-10-07) + Raydium AMM v4 docs

Derived from published fee schedules; illustrative split per $100K of trade volume, not live on-chain data.

VI. How Rhea works.

FIG. 5 — THE MECHANISMILLUSTRATIVE · NOT LIVE DATA

The trade ends. The fee keeps working.

A coin's trading activity funds the market beneath it.

01 Before graduation

Build the stockpile.

Creator fees buy the coin on its curve. SOL is held alongside the tokens for graduation.

02 At graduation

Seed more depth.

The stockpiled tokens and held SOL go into the pool, and the LP tokens are burned.

03 After graduation

Deepen. Reserve. Respond.

Fees fund more burned LP and a dip reserve. The agent may buy drawdowns within hard caps.

AFTER GRADUATION Every 100 units of creator fees ↓

45Burned liquidityDeepens the coin's pool

45Dip reserveBudget for capped buys

10Common pool$RHEA 20% · coins proven alive 80%

Unit · units per 100 of claimed creator fees, after graduationSource · backend/src/policy.mjs splitClaim, DEFAULT_POLICY (read 2026-10-12) · paper Table 4

Default routing in code at the default 0% creator share: 10% to the common pool, then a 50/50 split of the remainder. Candles are illustrative and show where the mechanism acts, not a forecast. Burned LP is not a price floor and does not prevent losses.

01
Before graduation
Half the fees buy the coin on its own curve and hold it; half wait as SOL. The stockpile grows with every trade.
02
At graduation
The stockpile and the SOL beside it go into the pool as liquidity, and the LP tokens are burned. The coin enters its pool deeper than it otherwise would.
03
After graduation
After the 10% common-pool share, half of the remaining fees deepens the pool. Half arms a reserve for drawdowns.
04
The dip agent
Watches the chart and spends the reserve into real drawdowns. Buy-only, capped in code it cannot override, every call recorded with its reasoning.
05
The common pool
10% of every coin's fees. $RHEA takes a fixed 20%; the rest goes to coins proven alive, weighted by the fees they claim. Coins that can't be proven alive draw nothing.

The technical paper

Technical paperrev 4updated 12 Oct 2026

How the routing actually works, what the code checks before anything is signed, and what is still unproven.

The manifesto is the argument. The paper is the specification: written against the code as it stands on 12 Oct 2026, with every external number dated and every Rhea number labelled by where it comes from.

Sections: 11
Figures: 5
Tables: 9
Notes: 21

SOURCEDCOMPUTEDFROM CODELOCAL VALIDATORAUDIT

Read the technical paper →

A different future

Launches stay on pump.fun. Coins stay ordinary tokens, tradable everywhere. What changes is underneath: every trade's fee goes back into the market beneath it. Burned liquidity can't be withdrawn; its depth still moves with the price.

Liquidity nobody can withdraw. Charts that can absorb their own exits. Coins worth holding.

Enter the launchpad →Read the technical paper →

Notes

¹pump.fun help center, “Transaction fees on Pump.fun”, read 2026-10-07, re-read 2026-10-12. Bonding curve 1.25% = 0.95% protocol + 0.30% creator. PumpSwap fees are tiered by market cap: the lowest tier (0–420 SOL) is 1.25% = 0.93% protocol + 0.30% creator + 0.02% to the pool (LPs); 420–1,470 SOL pays the creator 0.95%, stepping down to 0.05% at 98k+ SOL, and every tier above the lowest routes 0.20% to the pool.

²Raydium AMM v4 documentation. 0.25% swap fee = 0.22% retained by the pool (LPs) + 0.03% protocol.

³DefiLlama Fees & Revenue, fetched 2026-10-07. Raydium returned 92.8% of fees to LPs in 2024 (fees $664.8M vs protocol revenue $48.2M). DefiLlama models PumpSwap at a flat 0.05% protocol fee, so its PumpSwap revenue is likely understated.

⁴Constant-product market maker (x·y = k). For a pool holding SOL reserve R, a buy of size b raises the SOL side to R + b, so the fraction of the move attributable to the trade is ≈ b / (R + b). Exact for the SOL-reserve term before fees and price-impact rounding.