The pool and the liquidity lock

Once a StartupOS token is in its Uniswap pool, its liquidity is locked there forever. How and when it gets there depends on the launch model the creator picked.

	Instant	Bonding curve
Trades first on	Its own Uniswap V4 pool, from the launch transaction	A bonding curve inside the token
Ends up in	The same V4 pool	A Uniswap V4 pool, after graduation
Graduation fee	None	0.01 ETH on an ETH market, or 2% of the raise on a market paired with another token
Liquidity	Locked forever, from launch	Locked forever, from graduation

Instant tokens: straight into a V4 pool

In the launch transaction:

1. The token is created with a fixed supply of 1,000,000,000. Nothing can ever mint more.
2. Its Uniswap V4 pool opens at a low floor price. On an ETH pair, the whole supply is worth about 0.98 ETH at the start. Paired with another token, it is worth about 1 whole unit of that token.
3. The whole supply goes into the pool, with nothing on the other side. Buyers add the pair currency as they buy, and the price rises with demand. There is no practical price ceiling.
4. The liquidity position is locked in the StartupOS locker for good.

For the first 2 blocks (about 24 seconds), every wallet except the creator is capped at 5% of the supply bought and 5% held. See Trading and pricing.

Early on, the pool only holds what earlier buyers paid in, so a large sell moves the price a lot.

The hook

Each Instant pool has a hook: a small contract that Uniswap calls on every trade. StartupOS's hook:

• charges the trade fee and any holder tax, in the pair currency
• enforces the anti-sniping buy cap
• keeps each token's creator, platform, burn and holder rewards balances until they are sent on
• refuses to open a pool for any token the StartupOS factory did not launch

That last point stops pool squatting. Anyone can open a Uniswap pool, and a pool that already exists cannot be opened twice. Without the hook, an attacker could open a token's pool first, at a price of their choosing, and break the real launch.

A token's fee terms are recorded in the hook when its pool opens and can never be overwritten. The Uniswap pool fee itself is 0, so the locked position earns almost nothing: the hook's fee is what funds creators, holder rewards and burns. See Fees and burns.

A V4 pool has no address

All V4 pools live inside one shared Uniswap contract, the pool manager, and each is identified by a pool ID. The token has its own address. Its pool does not, so a token page has no separate pool contract to link to.

Bonding curve tokens: graduation to V4

• The curve sells 793.1 million tokens. The other 206.9 million are kept for the pool.
• It sells out after about $14,170 of net buying, valued at the pair currency's price when the token launched. The price rises 14.7 times along the way.
• At sell-out, curve trading stops until graduation runs. StartupOS usually starts graduation automatically, and anyone can trigger it.
• Graduation moves the token into a Uniswap V4 pool with StartupOS's hook, the same kind of pool an Instant token trades in.
• The pool position goes straight to the StartupOS locker, where it stays for good.

Graduation costs a flat 0.01 ETH on an ETH market, or 2% of what the curve raised on a market paired with another token. It is one or the other, never both. The matching share of the held-back tokens goes to the treasury with the fee, so the pool opens at exactly the curve's closing price. Nothing is burned at graduation.

After graduation, the hook charges the token's fee on every trade and keeps each share until it is sent on, as it does for an Instant token. The creator is paid with Deliver earnings to the creator. See Fees and burns and Creator rewards.

Earlier mainnet curve tokens: Uniswap V3

A bonding-curve token launched on mainnet before October 18, 2026 graduates into a Uniswap V3 pool instead: the 1% fee tier for Standard and Auto-Burn, or the 0.05% tier for Tax-Free. Its pool fee builds up on the locked position, and Run Collect & Burn shares it out between the creator, the burn and the platform. See Network and addresses.

The liquidity lock

Both kinds of locker, V4 for Instant and graduated tokens and V3 for earlier curve tokens in Uniswap V3 pools, give the same guarantee:

• No function can remove liquidity or move a position out.
• The lockers cannot be upgraded, and they have no owner-only functions.
• Only the StartupOS factory can place positions in them.

So nobody, including the creator and StartupOS, can pull a token's liquidity out of its pool. The position also can never be recovered, by anyone, for any reason.

The lock guards liquidity only. Read Risk disclosures for what it cannot protect, and Reading a token page for what each card on a token page shows.