Pump Bot Glossary: 32 Terms Defined in Plain English

The vocabulary in this field grew in conversation rather than in documentation, so several of these words are used for more than one thing and a few of them are used as general compliments. Each entry below gives the meaning this site uses, and says plainly where the usage is contested.

Two entries are worth reading before the others if you are new to the subject. Depth explains why a small market moves so easily, and exit liquidity explains what that costs the person who arrives last. Almost everything else on this site is an elaboration of those two ideas.

Automated market maker: A program that quotes a price from the quantities of two assets held in a pool rather than from a book of buy and sell orders. Every trade changes those quantities, so every trade changes the price. Almost all small tokens on Solana trade this way, which is why the size of the pool decides how far a given order moves the price.
Bonding curve: A launch mechanism in which a program sells a token at a price determined by how many have already been sold, rather than against a pool of two assets. It is a simpler shape than a pool and exists so that a brand new token can be traded before anybody has supplied liquidity for it. Fee behaviour and price impact on a curve differ from a pool.
Bundler: Software that groups several transactions so they execute together in one block. It is a launch-moment tool, concerned with ordering rather than with sustained activity, and it usually finishes within seconds. It is regularly confused with activity tooling because both are bought by token teams and both get called bots.
Coordinated buying: An arrangement in which a number of people agree to buy the same thinly traded asset at close to the same time. There is no software requirement and no deliverable. The mechanism is the participation itself, and the outcome for any individual is decided by their position in the order of arrival, which is not observable from inside.
Custody: Who is able to move funds. On a public chain this reduces to who holds the private key. Custody is the first commercial question to ask about any tool that generates wallets on your behalf, because a marketing page can describe a product accurately while leaving the custody arrangement entirely unstated.
Depth: How much value is committed to a market, and therefore how large an order it can absorb without the price moving much. Depth is not the same as activity: a token can record heavy trading and still move sharply on a modest order, because trading through a pool does not add to the pool.
Decentralised exchange: A program that swaps one token for another without an intermediary holding your funds. On Solana this typically means trading against a liquidity pool, sometimes through a router that splits an order across several pools to find a better price.
Execution bot: General trading automation that buys and sells according to rules on behalf of whoever owns it. Snipers, arbitrage programs, grid traders and rebalancers all belong here. Nobody joins somebody else execution bot, so an offer to let you participate in one is describing something other than what it appears to describe.
Exit liquidity: Being the buyer whose purchase allows somebody else to sell. In an ordinary market this describes everybody and means nothing. It becomes meaningful where the buying is concentrated and finite, because there the supply of later buyers runs out and whoever is holding at that point absorbs the difference.
Front running: Acting on knowledge of a trade that has not executed yet, in order to profit from its effect on the price. The term is used loosely in this market, sometimes for automated strategies that observe pending transactions and sometimes simply for anybody who was early.
Funding wallet: The wallet that holds the capital a tool will spend and distributes it to the wallets that do the trading. It is the account with the largest balance in any automated setup, which makes the question of who controls it the most consequential custody question in the arrangement.
Graduation: The moment a token leaves its launch mechanism and begins trading against a conventional liquidity pool. Also called migration. Fees, depth and price behaviour all change at this point, so a cost estimate made before graduation does not carry over to afterwards.
Holder distribution: How the supply of a token is spread across addresses. A supply concentrated in a small number of addresses means a small number of decisions can move the market. Distribution is public and checkable, and it carries far more information than a volume figure does.
Information asymmetry: A situation in which some participants know something others do not. In a coordinated buying arrangement the asymmetry is not incidental, it is the mechanism: somebody knew which asset and when before everybody else, and the arrangement produces gains for anyone only because that gap exists.
Insider distribution: Selling by people who held before an episode of promotion or coordinated buying, into the interest that episode created. The activity is visible in the transaction record afterwards; who was standing where is not, which is why the term describes a pattern rather than an accusation.
Keypair: A private key and its matching public address. The private key is the wallet in every practical sense; anybody who has it can move the funds. Nothing legitimate ever needs to be given your private key or the phrase that generates it.
Launch tooling: Software a token team runs at the moment a token becomes tradable, doing a narrow technical job over a very short window. It is the most falsifiable of the tool categories, because the result is a matter of which transactions landed in which blocks and that is a matter of public record.
Liquidity pool: An account holding a quantity of two assets, against which trades are priced. Somebody deposited both assets to create it, and can withdraw them. A pool becoming shallower during a volatile period is ordinary behaviour and it is exactly when the effect is least welcome.
Market manipulation: A general term used by financial regulators for conduct that interferes with the ordinary formation of a price, including coordinated buying followed by selling into the interest it produced. Definitions and enforcement differ by country and by asset type, and this desk is not in a position to tell you how any of them apply.
Price impact: How far your own order moves the price while it executes. It grows with order size and shrinks with pool depth. It is the reason the average price you pay is worse than the price you were quoted, and the reason a large exit realises less than the chart suggests.
Pump and dump: An old term from equities markets describing a promotion campaign that inflates interest in a thinly traded asset so that whoever organised it can sell into that interest. The term predates blockchains by many decades and the mechanism it describes is unchanged.
Pump bot: A phrase with no fixed meaning, used for launch tooling, market-activity tooling, general execution automation and coordinated buying arrangements. Because the four differ in who pays, who holds the keys and what can be checked afterwards, the phrase on its own carries no usable information.
Recovery scam: A second approach aimed at somebody who has recently lost money, offering to trace or recover it. It commonly asks for an upfront fee, a wallet connection or a seed phrase, and it arrives unsolicited, often after a public post. It succeeds because it reaches the target at the moment they most want it to be real.
RPC endpoint: The service a program talks to in order to submit transactions and read the state of the chain. Its speed and reliability decide how many attempts land, which is why the operational quality of a tool is often really a statement about its endpoint rather than about its logic.
Rug pull: The removal of the liquidity backing a token, or an equivalent action by whoever controls the supply, leaving holders with something that cannot be sold at any meaningful price. It is a distinct mechanism from coordinated buying, though the two are often mentioned in the same breath.
Seed phrase: A sequence of words from which private keys are derived. Anybody with the phrase controls every wallet derived from it, permanently and irreversibly. No product, verification step, support process or recovery service requires it, and there is no exception to that.
Slippage: The difference between the price you expected and the price you got. It comes partly from your own order moving the market and partly from other activity between the moment you signed and the moment the transaction executed. Both sources grow when a market is shallow and busy.
Sniper: A program that watches for a specific event, such as a pool opening, and tries to be among the first to trade it. It is a kind of execution bot, owned and operated for the benefit of whoever runs it, and it has no interest in what the chart looks like afterwards.
Thin market: A market with very little depth, where a modest order moves the price noticeably. Thinness is the property that makes a small amount of coordinated buying visible on a chart, and it is equally present when the selling starts.
Volume bot: Software that sends a schedule of small buys and sells on one token from wallets it controls, in order to produce recorded trading activity over a period. It is bought by a token team for a stated price, it takes no directional position, and its output is a public record that can be counted afterwards.
Wash trading: Trading in which the same party is effectively on both sides, so that activity is recorded without any change in beneficial ownership. It is the term regulators reach for when describing self-generated volume, and it is worth knowing because it is what several activity-tooling debates are actually about.
Worker wallet: One of the wallets a tool generates and funds in order to send trades. Their funding pattern usually makes them recognisable as a cluster in the transaction record. What happens to the small residual balances left in them at the end of a run is a question worth asking before a run starts.

If a term you met is missing, it is worth checking whether it is a genuine concept or a piece of promotional vocabulary that has not settled into a meaning yet. Both exist in roughly equal numbers. You can send a term to this desk through the contact page, and the pages under what the words mean cover the four categories these definitions keep referring back to.