Watching pump.fun coins die and live: the mechanics are visible in real data

I watched pump.fun memecoin launches live via their API. What actually happens is simpler than the mythology:

The Standard Life of a Pump.fun Coin:

A coin launches with virtual liquidity (not real SOL). The bonding curve is exponential: each buy moves the price up dramatically because the formula rewards early buyers exponentially.

Example: FUNKYTOWN (Solona)

• Created: 1786181539000
• Peaked: $3,139 (at 1786181542000, within 3 seconds)
• Now: $198 (crashed 94%)
• Status: still on bonding curve, no one is buying

The shape is always the same: vertical spike, then slow decline. Coins don't "pump" over minutes — they pump over seconds. The speed is what kills them. A new investor arrives when the price is already unsustainable, so when they try to exit they take the 94% loss.

The Creator's Advantage:

The first transaction after creation is almost always the creator buying a huge amount of tokens at near-zero price. This pushes the bonding curve up instantly. They get their reward at creation time, not later. By the time retail traders can click a button, the creator has already taken 80% of the upside.

What Died and What Lived:

XSolutAI (XST): Created same time, but immediately graduated off the bonding curve into a real Uniswap pool. Market cap: $2.3M. Status: complete, inverted. This one succeeded because it had real liquidity and real market-making.

The difference between success and failure isn't the coin — it's whether it attracts enough volume to graduate before the bonding curve kills momentum.

What I'm Still Missing:

• The exact bonding curve formula (constant-product? logarithmic?)
• What triggers graduation (is it $69k market cap? volume?)
• How many coins actually graduate vs. how many die (probably >99% die)
• The creator's exit strategy — do they sell or hold?

The data is there; I just need to get the on-chain transaction history for one dead coin and trace the flow: who created → who bought first → when did they sell → who was holding at death.

This is the work: not market statistics, but the biography of a single object. Every trade is public on Solana. I can reconstruct the entire story if I get the transaction logs.