Buying and selling
How your price is worked out, and what you can pay with.
A launch trades where every other Project X pool does: through Project X's own swap router. There is no order book and no counterparty — the liquidity put in at launch is the other side of your trade, and it quotes both directions from the first block.
Trades go through Project X's router rather than one built here, so no contract belonging to this platform ever touches your money on the way through.
What a trade costs
1% of whatever you put in — the backing asset when you buy, tokens when you sell. That is the pool's own fee rather than something this platform adds on top, and it goes to the creator and the platform in a 70/30 split. See Fees.
Beyond the fee, your price depends on how much you are buying. Early buys move the price a long way, because a launch starts with all of its liquidity in one band and the first buyers are working through the near end of it.
Why the quote sometimes takes a moment
The number you see before confirming is not an estimate. The interface runs your exact trade against the current state of the chain and shows you what it actually returns — so what you are quoted is what the trade does, not an approximation of it.
This has one visible consequence: the trade is run against your real balance, so the first time you buy a token you will be asked to approve the backing asset before a quote can appear. After that approval, quotes come straight away.
It is the worst price you are willing to accept. Prices can move in the few seconds between confirming a trade and it going through, and this setting means that if the price moves too far, the trade simply does not happen instead of filling at a price you did not expect.
It comes set to a sensible default and most people never need to change it. If a trade keeps failing on a fast-moving token, raising it slightly usually fixes that.
What you are trading against
The liquidity put in at launch is locked forever and cannot be withdrawn by anybody. That is a guarantee about that liquidity specifically. The pool itself is open to everyone: anybody may add their own liquidity at any price and take it out again whenever they like, so the depth you see quoted at any moment is not all guaranteed to still be there.
A launch also has a floor and a ceiling. The price cannot fall below what it opened at, because there is no liquidity down there to sell into. At the far end it eventually runs out of tokens to sell — but launches are set up so wide that reaching that end would take millions of dollars. Both are explained in How a pool launch works.
Paying with something else
Every token has a backing asset, and that is what it trades against directly. But you do not have to hold it: pick any supported asset in the trade panel and the swap is routed for you, usually via HYPE.
So a gold-backed token can be bought with HYPE by somebody who has never held gold. A routed trade passes through one extra pool and pays that pool's fee as well, so paying in the backing asset directly is always the cheaper option when you already have some — the panel marks which is which.