Why pair with SOL when you can pair with $SOLe?

01

Everyone pairs with SOL. That SOL just sits.

Open any trading terminal. Every new coin is quoted in SOL. You buy with SOL, you sell for SOL, the bonding curve holds SOL, the pool holds SOL. Nobody really chose it. It’s the default, and defaults stick.

Now look at what that SOL does all day: nothing. SOL inside a bonding curve isn’t liquid-staked: it doesn’t earn while it waits for the next buyer. Liquid-staked SOL earns about 5% a year right now (a reading, not a promise). The SOL under your memecoins skips that, every day, on every coin.

And every trade has a fee. Since 1 Mar 2024, trading fees on pump.fun came to $2.28B. The protocol kept $1.35B of it, 9,564,663 SOL: 59 cents of every dollar. factDefiLlama daily revenue, 1 Mar 2024 to 22 Oct 2026, at each day’s SOL price; it includes the $455.1M spent buying back PUMP.

That’s pump.fun’s business, and it built this whole category. It just doesn’t come back to you. Two leaks, then: the SOL under every coin just sits, and the fee leaves. $SOLe plugs both.

02

$SOLe in three lines

1. 1

   What it is. The ultimate liquid-staking coin: one token that holds the top liquid-staking tokens on Solana (JitoSOL, INF, jupSOL and mSOL, in equal parts), held 1:1 in a public on-chain account.

2. 2

   What it earns. All of their liquid-staking rewards (about 5% a year today), plus every protocol fee on sole, which buys $SOLe and burns it. Each burn is released over a few hours, so nobody can game it.

3. 3

   What that means. Its value in SOL only goes up. You trade in SOL. Never locked: swap back to SOL anytime.

“Only goes up” holds as long as the four tokens keep their value in SOL. Four providers spread that risk. Read the risks →

03

At worst the same. At best, you earn.

A coin paired with $SOLe is, at minimum, a coin paired with SOL.

Here’s why. Your coin’s price is set in $SOLe. The SOL value of your bag is its value in $SOLe times the SOL inside one $SOLe. That second number only goes up: liquid staking adds to it about once a day, and every burn adds to it. So whatever your coin does, the same bag is worth the same or more in SOL than it would on a SOL pair.

Pump, dump or crab: the coin’s own move is the same game it always was. $SOLe doesn’t change the coin. It changes what the coin sits on.

04

The math, in words

Two moving parts, both one-way.

Liquid staking. The SOL behind $SOLe is liquid-staked, so it earns rewards. The SOL grows, the number of $SOLe doesn’t. Each $SOLe holds a bit more SOL.

The burn. Every trade on sole has a protocol fee, and all of it buys $SOLe and burns it. The $SOLe goes. The SOL stays. Fewer $SOLe, same SOL behind them: each one holds more.

Round numbers, as an illustration. Nobody sold, nobody deposited, and every holder got +1%.

The $SOLe goes. The SOL stays.

Worked example: the pair on its own

You buy a coin with 1 SOL and hold it 30 days. To see what the pair adds, say the coin ends where it started.

Same coin, same move, more SOL. That part comes from the pair.

05

We simulated pump.fun since day one

What if pump.fun’s trades had happened on sole? Same days, same trades, same SOL price, from 1 Mar 2024 (the first day DefiLlama counts) to 22 Oct 2026. Only the fees change.

We ran it at 100%, 10% and 1% of pump.fun’s volume. Nobody moves all of pump.fun overnight, so the per-person numbers quote the 1% line. The model, the data and an adversarial audit of every number come with this article.

What they kept, and what would have come back

pump.fun kept $1.35B = 9,564,663 SOL. factDefiLlama

Same trades on sole: the protocol keeps 0. Instead, 5.54M SOL would have been burned into $SOLe, and creators would have earned 8.48M SOL. simulationBased on pump.fun’s real trades since March 2024, as if sole had done all of its volume. At 1%: 55,408 SOL burned and 84,818 SOL to creators.*

Trading fees come to about the same: $2.28B in the simulation too, plus up to $395M (0.10% a trade) on the SOL ↔ $SOLe step. simulationBased on pump.fun’s real trades since March 2024, as if sole had done all of its volume. An upper bound, if every trade crossed that pool; price impact not modelled.*

What that means per person

If you hold $SOLe. At 1% of pump.fun’s volume since day one, 1 $SOLe would be worth 1.73 SOL today, against 1.21 for the same SOL liquid-staked with no fees and 1.00 for plain SOL. 10 SOL held from day one: 17.3 SOL, against 12.1 liquid-staked and 10.0 left as SOL. simulationBased on pump.fun’s real trades since March 2024, as if sole had done 1% of its volume. 1 Mar 2024 to 22 Oct 2026, with outside holders joining $SOLe while fees add over 10% a year on top of liquid staking. 1.45 and 14.5 if many more people join $SOLe; 1.84 and 18.4 if they join slowly.*

If you trade. A bag held on $SOLe gained +1.34% in SOL over a typical 30-day hold, on top of whatever the coin did. Paired with SOL: +0. It beats the 0.20% round trip after about 4 days (about 14 at liquid staking alone). simulationBased on pump.fun’s real trades since March 2024, as if sole had done 1% of its volume. Median over every start day of the last 12 months, same condition, before the pool’s price impact.*

If you create. A typical graduated coin pays its creator 11.4 SOL over its life on sole, against 4.4 to 13.4 SOL on pump.fun, depending on its market-cap tier. The median coin: 0.032 SOL against 0.024.

Since pump.fun’s creator fees began (13 May 2025), the simulation pays creators $769.0M against about $412M on pump.fun. estimatethe simulation at 100% of the volume vs our estimate, $268M to $830M: DefiLlama publishes pump.fun’s pool LP and creator fees together, and the curve part includes cashback to traders

Where pump.fun pays more: young graduated coins between 420 and 4,420 SOL of market cap (0.90 to 0.95% vs 0.80%). Where sole pays more: on the curve (0.40% vs 0.30%), right after graduation (0.80% vs 0.30% under 420 SOL) and on big coins (0.26% vs 0.05%). And it’s paid in $SOLe, which keeps growing.

At launch, creators pick where their fees go: keep them, share them with holders, or buy back and burn their coin. Same amount, only the receiver changes.

06

If sole starts like pump.fun started

A simulation from March 2024 has a head start: two and a half years of compounding. A launch doesn’t. So here is year one on its own, two ways.

The neutral version. A fresh $SOLe launched on 23 Oct 2025, with nobody holding it yet, running pump.fun’s real last 12 months at 1%: after 12 months, 1 $SOLe = 1.22 SOL, against 1.06 for liquid staking alone. 26,831 SOL burned into $SOLe, 58,034 SOL paid to creators. simulationBased on pump.fun’s real trades since March 2024, as if sole had done 1% of its volume. Started 23 Oct 2025, same condition. 1.14 if many more people join $SOLe. The same 1.22 at 10% and 100%: volume buys size, not a better rate.*

The pump.fun-start version. Simulate pump.fun’s own first recorded year instead (Mar 2024 to Feb 2025, a market that grew 23-fold) with today’s liquid-staking rates: 1.28 SOL at 1%, and 10,742 SOL paid to creators in a year when pump.fun paid them nothing. simulationBased on pump.fun’s real trades since March 2024, as if sole had done 1% of its volume. Mar 2024 to Feb 2025.* A market growing that fast keeps outside holders behind the fees, so this version flatters. We lead with the neutral one.

Pace check: at 1% of pump.fun’s activity, about 74 SOL a day would be burned into $SOLe. simulationBased on pump.fun’s real trades since March 2024, as if sole had done 1% of its volume. 12-month average; 138 a day at the last 30 days’ pace.*

07

Why it’s PvE

No more PvP. On sole, it’s PvE. The coin is still the coin: its chart still has winners and exits.

What changes is the layer underneath. On a SOL pair, every trade’s fee leaves the game. On sole, it loops back:

1. You trade.Any coin, any size, either direction.
2. The fee buys $SOLe and burns it.Every protocol fee, on every trade.
3. Every $SOLe holds more SOL.Released over a few hours to everyone holding, in proportion to time held.
4. Everyone on $SOLe earns.Every coin’s liquidity, every bag, every creator paid in $SOLe, every holder. Including the people who lost on the coin: their leftover bag sits on $SOLe too.

then the loop starts again: better pairs, more launches, more trades, more burns

Your loss on a coin is still someone’s win. The fee no longer is.

2 SOL left in the curve of a coin that died on 1 March 2024 would be 3.46 SOL today on sole. Its holders can still sell into 3.46 SOL. On a SOL pair: 2.00. simulationBased on pump.fun’s real trades since March 2024, as if sole had done 1% of its volume. 2.91 if many more people join $SOLe.*

08

On a SOL pair, the SOL just sits there.

On 24 Oct 2026 we read pump.fun’s bonding-curve accounts on Solana (a sample, scaled up). About 280,000 SOL (±6,000) sits in curves that never finished. factour on-chain read

More than 19 million coins have launched on pump.fun, and 68.7% never trade after their first day. factCoinGecko Research, Jun 2026 Their SOL stays where it landed, just sitting. At the four tokens’ liquid-staking rate (5.19% a year, their last 30 days’ average), that’s about 15,000 SOL a year nobody gets.

Another 2.65M SOL sits in pump.fun’s own pools. factDefiLlama, 22 Oct 2026 That SOL does earn: LP fees. But no liquid staking: about 138,000 SOL a year of rewards forgone.

On sole, the same SOL would be $SOLe: liquid-staked from the first block, and growing with every trade on every coin.

09

Same habits. You just earn.

Nothing to learn.

• Trade in SOL.You never have to touch $SOLe yourself: the swap takes the step for you.
• Trade where you trade.On sole, or from any trading terminal.
• Launch in three steps.Name it, pick where the fees go, sign.
• Never locked.Swap back to SOL anytime, or take out the four liquid-staking tokens behind it.

The only difference is what sits under the coin. Same SOL in your wallet, plus a pair that only goes up in SOL.

“Only goes up” holds as long as the four tokens keep their value in SOL. Four providers spread that risk. Read the risks →

If one pair is at worst the same and at best better, why pick the one that can only ever be the same?

10

FAQ