How Turbine works

Turbine launches coins on pump.fun. The one thing it changes is what a coin’s creator rewards do. On pump.fun every trade pays a fee to the coin’s creator, and normally that goes to whoever launched it. On Turbine it goes to a job the launcher picked, once, at launch.

1. You launch. You connect a wallet, fill in the coin and pick one of three reward modes. One transaction, signed in your wallet, creates the coin on pump.fun with your wallet as creator, makes your optional first buy and sets up the reward split.
2. The split is locked. In that same transaction pump.fun’s fee-sharing config is set to two shareholders and then locked: the coin’s own program wallet (the rest) and the platform (the platform fee). The launcher is not on the list. pump.fun’s program enforces it, so neither the launcher nor we can edit it afterwards.
3. Rewards are paid out. Anyone can ask pump.fun to pay a coin’s accrued creator rewards to its shareholders. A small operator wallet does this on a schedule and pays the network fee.
4. The program wallet works. The coin’s program wallet runs its mode one step at a time. Each next step is worked out from the coin’s own ledger of finalized transactions, so a retry can never spend the same rewards twice.
5. The engine checks first. Before it touches a coin, and again before every payout, the engine reads the split from the chain. If it no longer matches the terms the coin launched with, the coin is marked mismatch and the engine stops touching it.

A mode is chosen once, at launch, and never changes. All three put rewards to work in the open: every step is a public transaction.

Turbine is not trustless and does not claim to be. The chain enforces some parts. Others rely on us. Here is which is which.

Program wallets are custodial

Each coin has its own program wallet: a Solana keypair our servers create when you draft a launch. The private key is encrypted at rest and only decrypted to sign a step. Neither the launcher nor the coin’s holders ever hold it. That is custody. If the key leaked, what the wallet holds could be taken. It holds rewards waiting to be used, the coin’s tokens between a buy and the burn or lock that follows, and, for one cycle, tokens from an ended lock before they are locked again. Tokens already burned or locked are out of reach.

The transaction policy

Before a program wallet signs anything, the exact bytes of the transaction pass a check in our code:

• the fee payer must be that wallet, and no address lookup table may be used, so every account is visible to the check;
• every instruction must call a program on the allowlist for that kind of step (pump.fun, PumpSwap, the lock program, the token programs, compute budget), and only the instructions that step needs;
• those instructions must name the coin’s own mint and canonical pool, the wallet’s own token accounts, and, for a lock, the wallet itself as the only recipient;
• at the top level, SOL may only move into the wallet’s own token accounts, never to another address (buys and deposits pay the curve or the pool only through the pinned program instructions above);
• token instructions are limited to burning, syncing and closing accounts back to the wallet. No transfer, approval, delegate or authority change is ever allowed at the top level.

This limits what a bug or a bad dependency in our own code could make a program wallet sign. It is enforced by our software, not by the chain, so it does not remove the need to trust us, and it cannot stop someone who already holds the key.

The lock program

Locks use the Meteora/Jupiter lock program. We rely on its contract to hold what it says it holds until the date it says.

pump.fun

The reward split is enforced by pump.fun’s fee-sharing program. If pump.fun changes how creator fees work, that applies to every coin on it, including ours, and pump.fun keeps administrative powers over its own program that neither the launcher nor we have. That is why the engine reads the split again before every payout and stops if it has changed.

The platform fee

A fixed share of every coin’s creator rewards goes to the platform wallet. It is set in the same locked split, shown on every coin page with its address, and cannot change for an existing coin. It is the platform’s money to use as it likes.

A background engine does two things for every live coin: it asks pump.fun to pay out rewards, and it runs the coin’s mode with what arrived. It runs in one of three states:

• Live. Payouts and mode steps are signed and sent for real.
• Test mode. Everything is built and simulated, and nothing is signed or sent. Counters stay where they were, and a coin’s next step is labelled simulated.
• Off. Nothing runs.

This site shows a banner whenever the engine is not live. Launching and the locked split are real in every state.

• Memecoins are extremely volatile. A coin can fall to zero. Burning, locking and deeper liquidity change supply or pool depth, not demand.
• You can lose everything you put in, including your first buy.
• Smart contract risk. pump.fun, PumpSwap and the lock program are third-party programs. A bug in any of them can lose funds.
• Custody risk. Program wallets are keys our servers hold, as described above.
• Rewards need trading. No trades, no rewards. A quiet coin’s mode has nothing to do.
• Market impact. Buys happen on the open market at market prices, with a slippage limit. In a thin market they move the price.
• The engine can be late or paused. Rewards wait, they are not lost, but nothing happens until it runs.
• This is not financial advice. Nothing here is a promise of returns.