Is a tugou the same as an altcoin?

No. ‘Altcoin’ covers every coin other than Bitcoin, a far wider category that includes many projects that have run for years. A tugou is only the earliest, smallest, completely unfiltered layer of meme coins.

Below what market cap does a token count as a tugou?

There is no fixed line. It is slang, not a classification. In practice people look at a combination of things: how long the token has been live, whether there is a verifiable team or use case, how concentrated the top holders are, and how far an ordinary trade moves the price. Market cap is only one of them.

Does a token that graduated on pump.fun still count as a tugou?

Most still do. Graduation only means the tokens on the bonding curve were bought out and liquidity moved to a PumpSwap pool. It is an automatic step the program completes by its rules, and the platform does not review or endorse the token because of it. The price can still crash after graduation.

Can I buy a tugou on a centralized exchange?

A token that launched hours or days ago can usually only be traded on-chain with a wallet. Centralized exchanges each run their own listing review, so check the exchange’s announcements. If someone claims a token that just launched is ‘about to list on a major exchange’, there is no way to verify it. Don’t treat it as a reason to buy.

Meme Tokens on Solana: What 'Tugou' Means and Why They're So Risky

'Tugou' is Chinese crypto slang for brand-new, tiny Solana meme tokens. What the word covers, how these tokens differ from others, and why they are so risky.

“Tugou” is a Chinese crypto slang term for meme tokens that have just launched, have no team behind them, have a tiny market cap, and are priced mostly on buzz and sentiment. On Solana, most of these come from launchpads such as pump.fun, where anyone can launch a token at almost no cost. It is not an official category. Block explorers and trading platforms never tag a token as “tugou”. The word describes a state: the token is very early, and nobody has vetted it for you.

What kind of token “tugou” refers to

The word has no authoritative definition, and there is no reliable record of where it came from. Read literally, it splits into two parts. “Gou” means dog, which brings to mind dog-themed meme coins such as Dogecoin. “Tu” literally means earth or soil, and here means homespun: grassroots, unpolished, with no backstory. Put together, it roughly means “a small meme coin that doesn’t even qualify as an established meme coin yet”.

First, a quick definition of meme coins: tokens with no real product or use, priced on internet jokes and community sentiment. A tugou is the earliest and smallest layer of meme coins.

When traders call a token a tugou, it usually has all of these traits:

It has been live for a very short time, typically a few hours to a few days;
There is no whitepaper, team or product, just a name, an image and a few social links;
Its market cap is small, so a modest trade can swing the price sharply;
Outsiders usually don’t know who launched it.

They also launch in huge numbers. In a 4-hour count we ran in mid-October, 6,646 new tokens launched on pump.fun, between 1,450 and 1,780 per hour.

Tugou vs. project tokens vs. established meme coins

All three are on-chain tokens and can be technically identical. The difference is what stands behind them and what they have been through.

Compared on	Project token	Established meme coin	Tugou
Product or use	Usually tied to a protocol or app	Mostly none; relies on community and recognition	None
Issuer	Usually a verifiable team or foundation	Not necessarily a clear team; mostly community-run	Anonymous address, often with no traceable background
How long it has traded	Longer, with price history to review	Longer, through several cycles of rises and falls	A few hours to a few days
Where it trades	Many platforms	Many platforms	Mainly the launchpad and on-chain pools
Price impact of an ordinary trade	Small	Small to moderate	Can be very large

One point to be clear on: a tugou and an established meme coin are not two different things but two stages of the same thing. Today’s established meme coins were also unknown small coins at the start. As for how many tugou ever get that far, we don’t yet have survival-rate data, so we won’t give a ratio here.

In the same count we also tracked “graduations”. New pump.fun tokens first trade on a bonding curve, a program that quotes prices automatically by formula, so the more people buy, the higher the price. Once all the tokens on the curve are bought out, liquidity moves to a PumpSwap pool. That step is called graduation. In those 4 hours, 117 tokens graduated. Those 117 were not necessarily launched in the same period, so you can’t divide them into 6,646 to get a “graduation rate”. Still, the gap in scale between the two figures is telling in itself.

Why tugou are far riskier than ordinary tokens

Nobody reviews them. pump.fun’s terms of service state that the platform is not responsible for user-created tokens and does not recommend that users buy, sell or hold them under any circumstances. The terms also require users to do their own due diligence on tokens and their creators. In other words, being visible and buyable on the platform has nothing to do with whether the token has been checked.

Launching a token has almost no barrier. According to pump.fun’s official fee page (checked October 2026), creating a token carries no platform fee. You only pay the Solana network fee and a small deposit required for on-chain accounts. A low barrier means plenty of copycat and impersonating tokens, and one person can launch them in batches.

Supply may be concentrated in a few hands from the start. pump.fun’s public developer documentation says the creator can buy in the same transaction that creates the token. The very first buys get the lowest price. If those tokens sit with the creator or wallets linked to them, later buyers are the ones left holding the bag when they sell.

Trading costs are not small. The official fee page lists a combined 1.25% per trade during the bonding-curve stage. From October 17, 2026, orders placed through the pump.fun website or mobile app also pay a platform fee, at a standard rate of 0.45%. Adding these two roughly, buying once and selling once on the website costs more than 3% in fees alone, before network fees. Even if the price doesn’t move, you start that far behind.

There is no price floor. A tugou has no assets or revenue behind it. Its price can fall all the way to nearly zero.

Before you touch one, get these straight

Trust the contract address, not the name. On Solana, a token is uniquely identified by its mint address (often called the contract address, or CA). Anyone can use any name and logo. The same name may belong to many different tokens on pump.fun. A name someone sends you means nothing. The string of characters in the address is what you need to check.

Check who launched it. The creator address can be looked up in a block explorer, and from there you can see which other tokens it has launched. An address that launched hundreds or thousands of tokens in a short time means something completely different from one that launched a single token. Why one wallet launches hundreds of tokens on pump.fun explains how to check.

Check who holds the supply. How much the top holders own, and whether a batch of wallets bought together at launch, can both be checked on-chain. How to spot a rug pull on Solana lists these signals one by one, along with what each can and cannot tell you.

Transactions can’t be reversed. Once an on-chain transaction is confirmed, it can’t be undone. If you send to the wrong address or buy the wrong token, there is no support desk to get it back.

Treat every purchase as money you could lose entirely. A tugou’s price can drop to nearly zero in a very short time, so decide before you buy what losing all of it would mean for you. Never click a contract address sent by a stranger in a private message, or a link asking you to connect your wallet to “claim an airdrop”.

The launch and graduation counts in this article come from a single count and will differ in another period. For the daily picture, see the daily report. How each number is counted is explained in the Methodology.