Pricing and supply
You pick a supply and an opening market cap. Those two numbers, plus the gas token's spot price, decide the price your pool opens at. Here is the arithmetic, and the failure modes it has.
Supply
The supply is minted once, in the token's constructor, and there is no mint function afterwards. Effectively all of it is deposited as liquidity — the only exception is a dev buy, which is bought out of the pool inside the same transaction rather than held back from it.
A ten-billion supply at a $2,000 cap and a one-billion supply at a $2,000 cap are the same market with a different number of digits on the price. What actually decides how a launch feels is the opening cap and the fee.
Opening market cap
The Studio offers $2,000 and $5,000 as presets on the Basic path, and takes any figure on Advanced. It is a dollar figure, which is convenient to think in and inconvenient to put on chain — there is no USD oracle in the launch path.
So the conversion happens in the frontend, at launch time:
- Read the gas token's spot priceUSD per ETH on Robinhood Chain, USD per BNB on BNB Chain.
- Convert the cap to the gas tokencap in ETH = cap in USD ÷ spot.
- Divide by supplyprice per token = cap in ETH ÷ supply.
- Encode as a starting priceThat price becomes the pool's initial
sqrtPriceX96, passed into the launch as a concrete number.
Worked example
| Opening market cap | $2,000 |
| ETH spot at launch | $4,000 |
| Cap in ETH | 0.5 ETH |
| Supply | 10,000,000,000 |
| Opening price | 0.00000000005 ETH per token |
| Fully diluted valuation at open | $2,000 |
Because the whole supply is in the pool, the opening FDV and the opening market cap are the same number. As buyers push the price up the range, both rise together.
Where the price goes from there
There is no bonding curve. The price is whatever the pool says, and the pool is an ordinary constant-product or concentrated-liquidity AMM. The shape of the climb is decided entirely by the tier's liquidity shape:
- Pro concentrates it, so the price walks through a band where depth is high, then accelerates once it leaves.
- Custom is full range with a hook, so the curve is the plain full-range one and the hook only affects the fee.
Reading a coin's real price
Token balances held by a concentrated-liquidity pool are not a price. Two pools with identical prices can hold wildly different reserves depending on where their liquidity sits. Read slot0 (V3) or the pool state via StateView (V4) and derive the price from sqrtPriceX96. Dividing reserves is the single most common way to render a confidently wrong price.
An indexer running behind the chain head reports the last trade it has indexed, which can be hours old. Every USD figure derived from it inherits that staleness. Take the live mark from the deepest pool for anything a user will act on. Reading token state has the recipe.
Failure modes worth knowing
A spot price of zero
If the USD-per-gas-token lookup fails and the code carries on with a zero, the computed launch price is zero and the pool is initialised at the tick floor. The consequence is not subtle: a coin that opened this way was bought out entirely — the full one-billion supply — for 0.003 BNB.
The rule is that the launch must be refused, not defaulted. If you are building a launcher of your own, fail closed here.
The tick floor is not a bug on Pro
A Pro (V3) position is full range by design, so its tickLower legitimately sits at the minimum tick and the price is carried by the initial sqrtPriceX96 instead. Treating "tickLower is at the floor" as evidence of a broken launch will hide every healthy V3 coin. The tell for the genuinely broken case is a starting price of zero, not a wide range.
Decimals on the pair token
If you launch against a custom pair token, its decimals matter. USDG on Robinhood Chain has 6; USDT on BNB Chain has 18. Assuming one when it is the other scales every routed amount by a factor of a trillion.
What is fixed forever at launch
| Fixed | Not fixed |
|---|---|
| Name, ticker, decimals | Price |
| Total supply | Market cap |
| Pool fee tier | Liquidity depth (it grows as the pool accumulates) |
| Opening price | Holder distribution |
| Fee recipients and split | Volume |
| The lock | — |