Each tier fires at most once per mint and tiers are independent. Every fire must be sustained (hold on the current tick and on a sample at least 10 seconds older; nothing fires before 20 seconds of age) and must pass hard gates that are not flags: liquidity of at least $1.5K and at least 2% of market cap, and buy volume on the tape of at least 3% of the market cap gained. Those gates exist because the first hour of testing produced a same-slot bundle marked to $475K at one second of age with zero parsed buys, and a 22-second-old token showing an $18.3M "market cap" on a few thousand dollars of liquidity. A price mark is not a surge.
A revival is a token with no one-minute trade candle for at least 24 hours that starts trading again, confirmed by the tape (at least 5 buys, $500 of buy volume, and 1.5× the pre-dormancy market cap) rather than by the price.
Risk flags were the norm, not the exception. Of 138 surge fires, 120 (87%) carried sniper_heavy (three or more known sniper wallets in the first-20 cohort), 103 (75%) bundled_launch (three or more early buyers in the same block), 86 (62%) early_buyers_exiting (at least half of a five-plus early cohort already sold at fire time) and 54 (39%) cold_deployer. Only 12 fires had no flag at all.
The tier that fires latest and largest — strong, a median 11.4× launch at fire time — had the worst hour: a median 0.16× at the sixty-minute mark. Breakout's 3-of-4 is four data points. Read the tiers on the scorecard (?stats=1), not on their names.
The split that matters: flags at fire time
| Fire carries… | With outcome | Up at +1h | Median peak | Median MC at +1h |
|---|
| no flag at all | 10 | 6 (60%) | 1.83× | 1.28× |
| any flag | 55 | 8 (14.5%) | 1.44× | 0.28× |
early_buyers_exiting | 34 | 2 (5.9%) | 1.45× | 0.23× |
without early_buyers_exiting | 31 | 12 (38.7%) | 1.39× | 0.54× |
bundled_launch | 39 | 4 (10.3%) | 1.45× | 0.28× |
without bundled_launch | 26 | 10 (38.5%) | 1.44× | 0.43× |
sniper_heavy | 50 | 8 (16.0%) | 1.44× | 0.25× |
without sniper_heavy | 15 | 6 (40.0%) | 1.61× | 0.50× |
cold_deployer | 22 | 2 (9.1%) | 1.44× | 0.38× |
without cold_deployer | 43 | 12 (27.9%) | 1.45× | 0.28× |
The peak is the same either way — a flagged surge and a clean surge both put in a ~1.45× high inside the hour. What differs is what is left at sixty minutes: 1.28× for clean fires against 0.28× for flagged ones. A surge whose early cohort is already selling at fire time is the cohort's exit, and the alert is telling you so. early_buyers_exiting is the single strongest separator on day one: 5.9% versus 38.7%.
Three examples
- Huhcat —
early at 58 seconds, $43,011 (4.4× launch), 220 buys, five tracked KOL buyers, no flags. Peaked at $419,607 inside the hour (9.8×) and was at $21,705 sixty minutes after the fire. The strong tier fired a minute later at $64,276 and saw the same peak.
- Lily —
early and strong in the same second at 122 seconds of age, $253,652 (22.1× launch), 192 buys from 59 unique buyers, flagged bundled_launch, sniper_heavy, early_buyers_exiting. Peaked at $1.17M, then $11,432 an hour after the fire (0.045×).
- BEFORE SOL —
early at 248 seconds and $954,705 (83× launch), 407 buys from 60 unique buyers, flagged sniper_heavy and early_buyers_exiting. Peaked at $1.47M and was $11,528 an hour later. The five worst one-hour outcomes were all this shape: a 51–83× multiple at fire, sniper_heavy, and the early cohort already selling.
Methodology
- Source:
token_surge_events, one row per fire, written by the surge-tracker service off the pricing bus; risk_flags[], buys, unique buyers and deployer tier are captured at fire time in one round-trip and never revised.
- Outcomes:
mc_usd_1h_after, peak_mc_usd_1h_after, low_mc_usd_1h_after filled by a cron every 10 minutes from one-minute candles for fires at least 65 minutes old. Only rows with outcome_computed_at set count toward any outcome figure; all 65 surge outcomes were priced (no token stopped being priced inside the hour). Time-to-peak is the candle minute holding the highest market cap in the 60 minutes after the fire.
- "Up at +1h" = market cap at the 60-minute mark above market cap at fire. "Doubled" = hour-peak at least 2× fire MC.
- Window: 2026-08-28 09:29:55 to 12:18:38 UTC — one morning, all pump.fun. Nothing older exists; the engine shipped that day. Sample sizes per cell are small (breakout n=4, clean n=10) and will move.
FAQ
How often does a pump.fun surge alert still hold an hour later?
On the first live day (28 August 2026), 14 of 65 surge fires (21.5%) were above their fire-time market cap sixty minutes later. Fires with no risk flag were up 60% of the time; fires flagged early_buyers_exiting were up 5.9% of the time.
How high does a pump.fun surge go after the alert?
The median fire peaked at 1.45× its fire-time market cap inside the hour, reached a median 4 minutes after the alert; 60% peaked within five minutes. 12 of 65 (18.5%) doubled. The median market cap at the sixty-minute mark was 0.33×.
What is the difference between early, strong and breakout surges?
early is at most 10 minutes old, at least $12K and 3× launch market cap; strong is at most 30 minutes, $30K, 6× launch and still climbing over the last three minutes; breakout is at most 2 minutes old, $45K and 8× launch. Each must be sustained for 10 seconds, pass liquidity and volume-backing gates, and fires at most once per mint.
Which risk flag matters most on surge alerts?
early_buyers_exiting on day one: surges where at least half the early cohort had already sold at fire time were up an hour later 5.9% of the time, against 38.7% for surges without it. bundled_launch (10.3% vs 38.5%) and sniper_heavy (16.0% vs 40.0%) split the same direction.
How do I get pump.fun surge alerts?
GET /api/v1/tokens/surges returns fires newest first with filters (?tier=, ?exclude_flags=, ?only_clean=1, ?min_buys=) and ?stats=1 for the live hit-rate scorecard; the token:surges WebSocket channel and webhook events push them as they fire. PRO tier and above.
The scorecard in this post is regenerated continuously from the same table — GET /api/v1/tokens/surges?stats=1&days=7 prints the current version — and the flags that separate outcomes are filterable at the API (?exclude_flags=early_buyers_exiting,bundled_launch) and on the token:surges stream. Related reading: how much of pump.fun graduates and how fast, the first three minutes of a pump.fun launch and why pump.fun tokens fail in the first hour. Plans are on the pricing page.