The Four Phases of a Pons Launch: Trading, Swept, Graduated, Rescued

The four phases, in order

• Trading - the normal state. The bonding curve is open, buys and sells both execute against it.
• Swept - the curve has reached its graduation threshold and is being prepared to move; sell availability changes here (see below).
• Graduated - the token has moved off the bonding curve entirely and into a Uniswap v4 pool, with liquidity locked.
• Rescued - an owner-level recovery state for an edge case, distinct from the normal launch-to-graduation path.

The subtlety most integrations miss

Pons's own documentation notes that a curve's readyToGraduate() check can return true while the token's phase field still reads as "trading" - graduation is a process, and sells close slightly before the phase label actually flips.

That means any integration that only checks the phase field to decide whether a sell is possible will be wrong during that window - it will show "trading" and let a user attempt a sell that the curve has already stopped accepting. TokenBundle's own integration checks readyToGraduate() directly rather than trusting the phase field alone, specifically because of this gap.

What graduation actually changes

Once a token graduates, it's no longer trading against Pons's bonding curve at all - price discovery moves to a Uniswap v4 pool, and that pool's liquidity is locked rather than sitting with the deployer. This is a one-way transition; a graduated token doesn't go back to curve trading.

FAQ

• Can a token go back to trading after it graduates? No - graduation moves the token to a Uniswap v4 pool permanently; it doesn't return to curve trading.
• Why did my sell fail even though the token still shows as trading? The curve may have already passed readyToGraduate() while the phase field hasn't updated yet - check current state directly rather than relying on a cached phase label.
• What is the rescued phase for? It's a separate, owner-level recovery state for an edge case outside the normal trading-to-graduation path, not something a typical launch passes through.