How Do Liquidity and Selling Work?
By The Derpy Dave Team
The Short Answer
Most Solana meme coins trade against a liquidity pool: a shared pot holding the token and SOL. When you sell, you add tokens to the pool and take SOL out. The pool's formula sets the price, so the bigger your sale compared to the pool, the more the price drops while you sell. That drop is called price impact.
To sell smoothly: keep some SOL for fees, check the price impact before you confirm, set a sensible slippage limit, and split large sales into smaller ones.
What a Liquidity Pool Is
On decentralized exchanges there is usually no person on the other side of your trade. Instead, an automated market maker (AMM) holds two tokens, for example $DERPYDAVE and SOL, and prices them based on how much of each is in the pool.
Aggregators such as Jupiter look across many pools, including Raydium, to find you the best route.
Price Impact: Why Big Sales Move the Price
Price impact is how much your own trade moves the price.
Example: imagine a pool with the equivalent of 100 SOL on each side. Selling tokens worth 1 SOL barely moves the price. Selling tokens worth 20 SOL moves it a lot, and you receive noticeably less than the price you saw before selling.
Your swap screen shows the estimated price impact. If it is high, sell less at a time.
Slippage: Your Safety Limit
Prices can move between the moment you click and the moment your transaction lands. Slippage tolerance is the most extra movement you will accept. If the price moves more than that, the transaction fails instead of filling at a bad price.
Jupiter explains its automatic settings in its slippage documentation. For most beginners, the default or automatic setting is a reasonable start.
Keep SOL for Fees
Every Solana transaction pays a small network fee in SOL, and busy periods may need a small priority fee to land quickly. See Solana's fee documentation. If you swap all your SOL into a token, you will not be able to pay the fee to sell it later. Always leave a little SOL in your wallet.
Launchpads and Bonding Curves
Many Solana meme coins start on a launchpad such as pump.fun. At first the token trades on a bonding curve, where the launchpad's formula sets the price as people buy and sell. Once enough is bought, the token graduates (also called bonding), and its liquidity moves into a regular pool, such as a PumpSwap pool for pump.fun tokens. After that it trades on decentralized exchanges and aggregators like any other token.
Example: $DERPYDAVE was created on January 25, 2026 and graduated from its bonding curve on March 20, 2026. It now trades on decentralized exchanges such as Jupiter, Raydium, Lute and Bags.
Why Some Tokens Are Hard or Impossible to Sell
Thin liquidity
If the pool is small, even modest sales crash the price. You can technically sell, but you may get far less than you expected.
Liquidity pulled
If the creator controls the pool's liquidity, they can remove it, leaving almost nothing to sell into. This is the classic "rug pull". Scanners such as RugCheck show whether liquidity is locked or burned.
Honeypots
A honeypot lets you buy but not sell. On Solana this usually comes from:
The scam check guide shows how to spot these before you buy.
How to Sell Step by Step
Quick Checklist
Read Next
Before your next buy, review what to look for before buying a meme coin and run the scam check. New to buying? Start with where to buy Solana meme coins. All guides are on our Learn page.
Sources
This guide is for education only and is not financial advice. Meme coins are highly volatile and you can lose everything you put in. Never invest more than you can afford to lose.
Written by The Derpy Dave Team
The people behind Derpy Dave, a character-driven movement for the overlooked, the sidelined and the counted out.
@Being_DerpyAF