City Coins
// the details

How City Coins works.

Many coins per city, one city vault

The registry is the 31,736 places with 15,000+ people in GeoNames. You pick a row, never type a name, so “NYC” and “New York” are always the same city. Anyone can launch a coin for any city, and a city can have as many as people want. Every one of them is created with the same city vault as its creator, so all of a city’s coins pay the same city. Tickers are unique across City Coins, and a coin is only listed once the chain shows it exists with the city vault as its creator.

Where creator fees go

pump.fun pays a creator fee on every trade to whichever address is set as the coin’s creator. When you launch through City Coins, that creator is the city’s vault, not your wallet. The launch transaction is pre-signed by the new mint, so it can’t be altered to point the fees anywhere else, and we check the creator on chain before accepting the coin. Anyone can sweep a pump.fun creator vault into its creator, so fees can be collected without pump.fun’s involvement.

The split

Creator fees build up in pump.fun and are swept into the city vault once a day per city (sooner only if they pass 1 SOL), as long as they're worth at least 0.01 SOL: in SOL for SOL-paired coins, in the paired token (NVDAx, USDC, …) for custom pairs. One sweep a day keeps network fees negligible. The swept fees are then split: by default 50% stays in the city vault and 50% goes to verified locals, weighted by the SOL value of what they hold across the city’s coins (graduated coins count at their PumpSwap price). To qualify you must hold at least 0.2% of a city coin's supply (2,000,000 tokens) in the wallet you verified with, so splitting coins across many wallets earns nothing. Coins count at the lowest balance you held over the last 24 hours. Shares too small to send (under 0.001 SOL, or 0.005 SOL worth of a token) wait for the next day instead of being lost, and a pool is only created when the vault can pay it in full. Every distribution publishes its inputs and a Merkle root, and each payout is checked against that root before it is sent. Rewards are then sent automatically, up to 15 wallets per transaction, so no one has to claim; you can still claim early from the Rewards page. Coins launched with holder rewards skip all of this: pump.fun pays their creator fee straight to every holder.

Proving you’re local

You check in from the city page. Your browser shares your device’s precise location once, and it has to be inside the city: within 20–70 km of the centre, depending on the city’s size. Then we compare it with where your network says you are:

  • Your network must be in the same country and near your device. A spoofed GPS reading usually breaks this, and the claim is flagged for review.
  • Check-ins from VPNs and hosting/datacenter networks are flagged. Switch the VPN off and check in from your usual Wi-Fi or mobile data.
  • You start earning after clean check-ins on three different days, at least 36 hours apart in total, so one faked check-in isn’t enough.
  • Coins count at the lowest balance you held over the last 24 hours, so buying right before a payout and selling after earns nothing.
  • Jumps no one could travel between check-ins are flagged.
  • More than ten wallets checking in from one network in a day are flagged. Splitting coins across wallets earns nothing anyway: each wallet needs its own 0.2% stake.
  • A check-in counts for 30 days. After that you check in again to stay eligible, so people who have moved away drop out.

Flagged claims are reviewed, and each city decides whether they are excluded or down-weighted. We keep a rounded point (about 11 m) and a keyed hash of your IP for that review, never your exact address. Where SMS is set up, a phone code can be used as well; the number is stored only as a keyed hash, so one number backs one wallet.

What to know

  • Memecoins are volatile and can go to zero. Holding a city coin is not an investment in the city.
  • The city vault keys are held by the City Coins server, which signs payouts. That is custodial: you are trusting the operator with the vault share and unclaimed rewards.
  • Launching costs you pump.fun’s account rent and fees (about 0.01 SOL). The creator fees go to the city and its locals, not to you.
  • Location checks raise the cost of faking locality a lot; they don’t make it impossible. A determined person with GPS-spoofing tools and a local network can still fool them, which is why flagged claims are reviewed and claims expire.