The single pool

Every coin has exactly one market, and the entire float is in it.

Why one

A coin split across several venues has no price. Trackers pick one of them, usually the wrong one, and show a number nobody could actually trade at. Holders read a market cap that does not survive contact with a sell.

Apex Fun removes the option. There is one pool. A price you read is the price the whole float sits behind, because there is nowhere else for it to be. It also removes a class of failure fragmented launches never escape: liquidity that has to be managed between venues, rebalanced, topped up, and that fails exactly when volume arrives. There is nothing to manage here.

Single-sided, and what that means

The position holds only the coin, spread from the opening price upward. No dollars are deposited at launch, which is why launching needs no capital beyond the $1 seed buy — and that seed is a purchase, not a deposit.

As buyers arrive they walk up the curve, and the USDC they pay in accumulates in the pool. The position is the coin's order book and its treasury at the same time: what buyers put in is what sellers can take out, and there is no third place for it to go.

The fees on a swap

Every swap pays one fee, the pool's 1%, and it is in the quote before you sign. It is the same on every coin: a coin's pool is a Pharaoh V3 pool in its 1% tier (tick spacing 100), and there is no fee setting at launch.

Of each trade:

• 0.665% goes to the coin's creator, for as long as the coin trades;
• 0.285% goes to the protocol;
• 0.05% stays with Pharaoh, which keeps 5% of the swap fee of every pool on it.

The locker receives what the pool pays its liquidity (0.95% of the trade) and splits it 70/30 between the creator and the protocol; that split is a constant with no setter.

The opening price

Set exactly rather than approximately. A V3 pool's raw price is token1-per-token0 in smallest units, so the gap between an 18-decimal coin and 6-decimal USDC is part of the price, not a rounding detail — a factor of a trillion:

sqrtPriceX96 = floor( sqrt( P · 2^192 / (10^18 · 10^(18 − dq)) ) )

with P the target price in dollars and dq the quote's decimals (6 for USDC). The square root is taken over the whole expression, not applied afterwards. The pool is initialised precisely on the range's lower bound, which is what makes a position of pure coin valid with no counterparty.

The coin is also CREATE2-mined to sort below its quote, so it is always token0. That is what makes every tracker and chart treat the coin as the base and price it in dollars, rather than showing the inverse. USDC on Avalanche lives at 0xB97E…8a6E, so about seven random addresses in ten already sort below it; the launcher searches up to 4,096 salts and the search is short.

Depth where it is used

A tracker's own USDC reference pool (0.05% tier) does not spread its capital across all possible prices. Most of it — 70% — sits in a tight band of ±200 ticks, about ±2%, around the tracker's NAV, with the rest full-range underneath so no price can escape the book.

The gain is not marginal. For a band bounded by Pa and Pb, capital efficiency against a full-range position is:

E = 1 / ( 1 − (Pa/Pb)^(1/4) )

A ±2% band is worth roughly fifty times the same money spread across the whole curve; a ±10% band, about eleven times. That is what makes serious depth affordable exactly where trades actually happen — and why a bonded coin's quoted depth jumps at the moment of migration.

Why keep a full-range part at all: in tests run for an earlier deployment (not on Avalanche), a tight band alone absorbed a few buys cleanly and then emptied, and the tracker's pool price ran away. The full-range remainder is the floor under that cliff.