How a launch works
A token has two lives. It is born on a curve, and if enough people buy it, it moves to a pool and stays there.
Life one — the curve
There is no liquidity to provide and nothing to list. The moment a token exists, it can be bought.
Price is set by a formula, not by other traders: every buy pushes it up, every sell pushes it down, and the whole supply is not for sale at once. As configured today, 60% of the supply is sold on the curve and the other 40% is held back for the pool. Across that 60%, the price rises about 2.25x from the first buy to the last.
Selling works the same way in reverse, at any time. There is no lock-up on the curve.
Graduation
When the amount raised crosses a threshold, the launch graduates. The 40% held back, plus the money raised, becomes a Uniswap v4 pool.
Two things about that are worth understanding, because they are unusual.
It happens inside somebody's buy. There is no bot watching, no team member pressing a button, no scheduled job. The buy that crosses the line is the graduation — that trader's transaction does the work, and pays a little more gas for it. This is deliberate: if a launchpad depends on something off-chain to finish a launch, then the launch can be left half-done when that thing breaks.
The liquidity is locked permanently. It is not held by the creator and it is not held by us. Nobody can withdraw it. The fees it earns are split between the creator and the protocol, and the liquidity itself stays.
Life two — the pool
After graduation the token is an ordinary Uniswap v4 asset. It trades against whatever it was paired with, at whatever price the market sets, through any interface that can reach Uniswap.
Mechanics the creator attached still apply — several of them are designed for exactly this moment, when a token stops being on a curve and meets a real market.
What it costs
As configured today: 1% of each trade on the curve goes to the protocol, and the pool charges a 1% fee which is split between the creator and the protocol. A creator may also set a share of their own, and the Fees mechanic is how that is disclosed.
Gas on Arbitrum is a fraction of a cent, except for the buy that graduates a launch, which does more work and costs proportionately more.
These are settings rather than laws, and they are stated on each launch's page. Read them there — that page reflects what the contracts actually say, and this one is only a description.