How to Create a Raydium Liquidity Pool on Solana

A token nobody can trade isn’t really launched. To give it a market, you open a liquidity pool — a pot holding your token and SOL that a decentralized exchange uses to price and settle trades automatically. On Solana, the standard place to do that is Raydium, and the modern way is a CPMM pool that skips the old, expensive OpenBook step entirely.

This guide covers how a pool actually works, how the price gets set, exactly what to deposit, and the decision that matters most to buyers — what you do with the LP tokens afterward.

How an automated market maker prices your token

Raydium’s CPMM pools use a constant-product formula, the same model that made Uniswap work: the pool holds two assets, and the product of their amounts stays constant as people trade. In plain terms, when someone buys your token with SOL, the pool’s token balance goes down and its SOL balance goes up, so the next token costs slightly more. Sells do the reverse. No order book, no market maker — the math sets the price on every trade.

Two things follow from this, and both matter:

• Your deposit sets the opening price. The ratio of token to SOL you put in is the starting price.
• Depth sets the stability. More liquidity means each trade moves the price less. Thin pools swing hard on small trades and are easy to manipulate.

CPMM vs AMM v4: why you don’t need OpenBook

Raydium offers two pool types, and the difference is worth understanding because it decides your cost and complexity.

	CPMM (recommended)	AMM v4 (legacy)
OpenBook market	Not required	Required — you create one first
Setup cost	Lower	Higher (plus OpenBook market rent)
Complexity	Pair and go	Extra market-creation step
Best for	New token launches	Order-book integration needs

For almost every new launch, CPMM is the right choice. The older AMM v4 pools tie into an OpenBook order book, which means creating and funding a market account before you can even open the pool — extra transactions and non-trivial rent. CPMM drops all of that: you pair your token with SOL and it’s tradable on confirmation.

Before you open a pool

Have these ready:

1. A finished token. Ideally with mint and freeze authority already revoked — most buyers won’t touch a pool for a token whose supply can still be inflated or whose holders can be frozen.
2. The tokens to deposit, in the wallet you’ll use.
3. The SOL to pair, plus a little extra for fees and rent.
4. A starting price in mind, which really means a deposit ratio (more on that next).

Step by step

1. Connect your wallet and open the liquidity pool creator.
2. Select the pair. Your token as the base, SOL as the quote. CPMM needs no market ID.
3. Set the amounts. Enter how many of your tokens and how much SOL to deposit. This ratio sets the opening price — the tool shows the implied price as you type so there’s no guesswork.
4. Review the assay line. Network rent, the pool creation cost, and the service fee are itemized before you sign. Nothing is bundled.
5. Sign once. The pool is created and funded in the transaction. In return you receive LP tokens representing your share of the pool.

Worked example

Say you deposit 15 SOL and 30,000,000 tokens. The opening price is 15 SOL per 30,000,000 tokens, or 0.0000005 SOL per token. If SOL is around $150, that’s roughly $0.000075 per token to start. From there, buyers and sellers move the price along the curve.

Adjust the ratio to hit the launch price you want — fewer tokens or more SOL raises the starting price; the reverse lowers it.

The decision buyers care about: burn or lock the LP

When you create the pool you receive LP tokens, and whoever holds them can withdraw the entire pool’s liquidity. That’s the mechanism behind a classic rug pull: a team opens a pool, waits for buyers, then pulls the liquidity and leaves holders with tokens they can’t sell. Buyers know this, so what you do with your LP tokens is the loudest trust signal you can send.

• Burn the LP. Send the LP tokens to a burn address and the liquidity can never be withdrawn — by you or anyone. This is the strongest possible “I can’t rug you” statement, and it’s why so many meme coins burn their LP. You can do this from the burn bench.
• Lock the LP. Place the LP tokens in a time-locked contract that returns them on a set date. This suits projects that legitimately need the liquidity back later while still proving they can’t pull it now.
• Keep the LP. Only sensible if you’re actively managing the position and your holders understand that — otherwise it reads as an open rug risk.

Whichever you choose, put it on your token certificate so buyers can verify the LP status live from the chain instead of taking your word.

Removing liquidity later

If you kept or locked your LP, you can withdraw part or all of it from the remove liquidity bench when it’s time. Partial withdrawals let you rebalance without closing the market. Just remember that visibly pulling liquidity from a token you marketed as safe will be seen — on-chain, everything you do to a pool is public.

The short version

Open a CPMM pool, skip OpenBook, set your opening price with the deposit ratio, and — if you want buyers to trust the market — burn or lock the LP and publish the proof. The pool takes one signature; the credibility comes from what you do with the LP tokens afterward. When you’re ready, the liquidity pool creator walks through the pairing with every cost itemized first.