Enough to stand above whatever else is on the board in the same hour, spread over enough wallets and enough minutes to read as a crowd. That is a relative target, not a fixed one, and it moves by an order of magnitude between a quiet weekday morning and a mania. The method is to open the feed you want to appear on, read what the tokens sitting at the visibility cut-off are actually doing right now, and size against that figure with a margin.
Short version
- No platform publishes a threshold. Any exact number you are quoted came from a group chat.
- The target is competitive, not absolute. Read the board before you decide anything.
- Volume without maker count is the weakest possible version of the signal.
- Duration is half the answer. The same volume over ten minutes and five hours are different products.
- Too small is a total loss, not a partial one. A session below the cut-off buys nothing.
Why there is no number
Pump.fun and DexScreener both sort, they do not gate. There is no line at which a token is admitted. There is a list, ordered by a formula neither platform publishes, and your position on it depends on what everyone else is doing at that moment. A figure that put a token near the top at 04:00 UTC on a Tuesday can leave it invisible on a Friday afternoon during a run.
This is also why the numbers circulating in group chats are worse than useless. They are a snapshot of one board at one moment, repeated until they sound like a rule. The only honest version of the answer is a method, and the method takes about five minutes.
Reading the cut-off
Open the board you actually want to be on
The Pump.fun feed and DexScreener trending are different boards with different eligibility. Before graduation you are competing on the first. After graduation, on the second.
Find the visibility edge
Scroll to where you stop being willing to scroll. That position is the practical cut-off, because it is where a real visitor stops looking too.
Read three numbers off the tokens sitting there
Volume over the window the board is sorting on, transaction count, and maker count. Write all three down, because the ratios between them matter more than the volume alone.
Add a margin for the hour you will run
If you are launching into a busier period than the one you measured, the cut-off will be higher by the time you get there. Size for the board you will meet, not the one you looked at.
Convert to a session, not just a number
Take the volume target, pick an order band, derive the wallet count, and set the duration to cover the window you care about. The method for that is in the wallet count guide.
The wallet arithmetic that turns a volume target into a configuration is worked through in how many wallets a volume bot needs.
The three numbers, not one
Volume on its own is the least informative of the three figures you wrote down. What a reader, human or algorithmic, actually evaluates is the relationship between them.
| Shape | What it looks like | How it reads |
|---|---|---|
| High volume, low makers | 400 SOL across 60 addresses | A desk, or paid flow with no spread |
| High volume, high makers, short window | 400 SOL, 1,800 addresses, 11 minutes | A burst with no texture, obviously coordinated |
| Moderate volume, high makers, long window | 250 SOL, 1,500 addresses, four hours | The closest shape to organic interest |
| Low volume, low makers | 40 SOL across 80 addresses | Below the cut-off, invisible either way |
Row three is the one to aim at, and it is usually cheaper than row one. That is the counter-intuitive part of sizing: pushing the volume number up is often the least efficient way to improve how a session reads. Spreading the same volume further and running it longer costs the same in tool fees and produces a better tape.
Session sizes and what they are for
| Target | Fits | Typical window | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 SOL | Quiet hours, early launch | 45 to 90 minutes | A readable curve at the smallest size that still reads |
| 300 SOL | Ordinary board conditions | 2 to 4 hours | Staying visible through the first attention window |
| 500 SOL | Busy board, or a curve in progress | 3 to 6 hours | Holding position while a community forms |
| 1,000 SOL | Mania conditions, or across migration | 5 to 10 hours | Continuity from the curve into the AMM pool |
Note the right hand column. Each of these is a different job rather than a bigger version of the same one. A launch push and a slow build before a migration want opposite settings, and picking the wrong job is a more expensive error than picking the wrong size.
The most common sizing mistake
Underfunding. A session sized below the cut-off does not buy a smaller amount of visibility, it buys none, because the token never enters the part of the list anyone reads. Every cost line is still paid in full. This is the one place where spending less is not a partial saving, and it is why there is a floor below which running a session is not worth doing at all.
The second most common is buying a number without buying a window. A large session compressed into fifteen minutes spends the whole budget before most of the audience for that hour has even loaded the board. The volume figure is impressive and nobody was there to see it.
Whether the window is worth buying at all is a separate question, and it is answered in do volume bots work.
What the number cannot tell you
No volume figure predicts an outcome, because the outcome depends on what people find when they arrive. PumpWave prices a session at a flat 1% of the target you set, from 100 SOL up, and shows the fee before anything is funded. What it will not do is tell you that a particular number produces a result, because nobody can know that and the services that claim to are describing something they do not control.
Questions people actually ask
How much volume does a Pump.fun token need to trend?
Pump.fun publishes no trending threshold. The practical target is whatever the tokens at the visibility cut-off are doing on the board at the hour you launch, plus a margin, spread over enough wallets and minutes to read as broad participation.
Is 100 SOL of volume enough?
100 SOL can be enough on a quiet board, at a small market cap, with good spread and a long enough window. During a busy period it usually is not. The figure only means something next to the board you are competing on.
Should I run a bigger session or a longer one?
A longer session beats a bigger one in most cases. The same volume spread over more time produces a tape with texture and costs the same in tool fees. Size beyond the cut-off has diminishing returns much faster than duration does.
Does the market cap change how much volume I need?
Yes, market cap changes the figure you need, indirectly. Volume is read relative to the size of the token, so the same absolute figure looks very different at a 20k market cap than at 500k. A ratio that looks impossible for the size is its own warning sign.
What if the board is quiet when I launch?
A quiet board is the cheapest time to be visible, and it is a genuine advantage. Sizing against a quiet board means a smaller session does more, which is exactly why reading the board first is worth the five minutes.
Can I add volume to a session while it runs?
The cleaner approach is a second session rather than an extension, because it keeps the accounting and the fee simple. Whether that is worth doing depends on whether the first one moved the organic signals at all.
Run one and watch it land
Paste a mint, shape the session, see the exact fee before you fund anything. Flat 1% from 100 SOL, no install, no seed phrase.
Builds and runs the PumpWave session engine at PumpWave Labs in Estonia. Writes about Solana launch mechanics from the operator side: what settles, what it costs, what the board does with it. Corrections and arguments to support@pumpwave.net.