There is no order book and no other buyer or seller. You trade against the contract, at whatever price the curve says.

Every token sold costs more than the one before it. The last one on the curve costs exactly 9 times the first, which is why whoever buys earliest pays least — and why arriving late is paying more for the same token, by design. The prices shown are a NEAR coin's; a coin in another pair climbs the same nine times, in its pair.

Each launch mints 1,000,000,000 tokens, once, and never mints again. 750,000,000 of them sell on the curve; the other 250,000,000 are held back to open the pool.

Every token runs this curve first, whichever pool it graduates into. On a token made since v2.5, each trade also spends its buyback share on the curve at once and burns what it buys, so the supply falls while the curve fills. That burn never buys the curve's last token: a real buyer always finishes the curve.

The virtual reserve

On a NEAR coin, the curve behaves like a pool that already holds 1,000 NEAR and 1,125,000,000 tokens before anybody trades. Nobody deposited either — they are numbers in the contract, and they exist so the first buyer meets a real price instead of a price of zero. Their product is what stays constant as the curve is climbed, which is why the raise works out to exactly twice the virtual reserve and the price ends up nine times the first.

A token paired with something else runs this same curve in its pair. Each pair's reserve was set to 1,000 NEAR's worth of it when the pair was added, and every token copies its pair's reserve at creation and keeps it for life. So a token graduates at a fixed amount of its pair, and what that is worth in NEAR moves with the pair's price. We can change a pair's reserve for future launches; that never touches a token already made. The shape, the nine times and the percentages below are the same for every pair. The amounts in each pair are on the pairs page.

Progress is tokens sold, not NEAR raised

The curve is convex, so the money arrives late. Three quarters of the inventory is gone by the time half the money is in. The figures below are for a NEAR coin.

Sold	Price (NEAR)	Market cap (NEAR)	Raised (NEAR)
0%	0.000000888889	888.89	0
25%	0.00000128	1,280.00	200
50%	0.000002	2,000.00	500
75%	0.000003555556	3,555.56	1,000
90%	0.000005555556	5,555.56	1,500
100%	0.000008	8,000.00	2,000

The progress bar on a token page counts tokens sold. A bar counting NEAR raised would read 50% at the moment three quarters of the supply had already gone, which is the wrong picture for anyone deciding whether to buy.