Creating an LP Farm, in One Paragraph
An LP farm pays people to keep liquidity in your pool. A liquidity provider stakes the LP tokens they received from Raydium, Meteora, Orca or PumpSwap, their liquidity stays live on the DEX earning trading fees, and your farm pays them a separate reward token on top. On StakePoint you choose the LP token, choose the reward token, deposit the rewards, set a duration and sign two transactions. The farm is live with a public page in minutes and costs 1 SOL to create.
Key Takeaways
- A farm rewards liquidity providers, not holders. If you want to reward holders, that is a staking pool. Most projects end up running both.
- Any fungible SPL LP token works: Raydium AMM v4 and CPMM, Meteora DAMM v1 and v2, Orca and PumpSwap. Concentrated positions (Raydium CLMM, Meteora DLMM) are NFTs and cannot be farmed.
- The reward token can be any SPL or Token-2022 token, including your own. Native SOL is not supported as a reward token.
- Rewards are deposited upfront and distributed across the duration in proportion to what is staked. The farm cannot promise more than it holds, and you can top it up at any time before it ends.
- APR is shown in USD, calculated from the reward token price and the LP token price, so providers can compare it directly against impermanent loss.
Create an LP Farm
Raydium · Meteora · Orca · PumpSwap · SPL and Token-2022 rewards
Why Projects Run Farms
Liquidity leaves pools for one reason: the provider decided the trading fees were not worth the risk. On a new token that risk is impermanent loss, and on a volatile pair it is large. A 2x move between your token and SOL costs a provider about 5.7% against simply holding, a 5x move about 25%. Fees on a thin pool rarely cover that.
A farm changes the arithmetic. Fees plus farm rewards now sit on one side and impermanent loss on the other, and for most of the moves a new token makes, a well funded farm wins. The provider stays, the pool stays deep, slippage stays low, and buyers get a better fill than they would on a pool everyone has abandoned.
That is the whole purpose. You are paying for depth, and depth is what makes a token tradeable.
What You Need Before You Start
An LP token that is fungible. When you add liquidity to a standard pool, the DEX gives you a fungible LP token you can see in your wallet. That is what gets staked. Raydium AMM v4 and CPMM pools, Meteora DAMM v1 and v2 pools, Orca standard pools and PumpSwap pools all issue them. Concentrated liquidity positions do not: Raydium CLMM and Meteora DLMM positions are NFTs, one per range, and there is no shared token to stake. If your pool is concentrated, the people providing liquidity cannot farm it.
A reward token and a reward budget. Most projects reward in their own token. You can also reward in a partner token, USDC or any other SPL or Token-2022 token. The reward token and the LP token can both be Token-2022, including tokens with transfer fees, which StakePoint handles by reading the actual vault balance after transfer.
A wallet holding the rewards plus 1 SOL. The creation fee is 1 SOL and is enforced on-chain. The reward tokens move into the farm's reward vault at creation.
Sizing the Reward Deposit
Two numbers decide everything: how much you deposit and how long the farm runs. Divide one by the other and you have the emission per second, shared across everyone staked.
Work backwards from the rate you want to be paying. Decide a USD APR that beats the impermanent loss you expect on the pair, estimate the dollar value of LP that will realistically be staked, and the deposit falls out of those two figures. Choosing the deposit first and discovering the APR afterwards is how farms end up advertising a number nobody finds worth the risk.
A worked example. You expect $50,000 of LP to be staked and you want to pay 60% APR. That is $30,000 of rewards over a year. At a reward token price of $0.01 that is 3,000,000 tokens for a twelve month farm, or 750,000 for a three month farm paying the same rate.
Three things to keep in mind:
- The rate floats. With $25,000 staked instead of $50,000, the same deposit pays 120%. With $100,000 staked it pays 30%. Early providers earn the most, which is the incentive you want at launch.
- The reward token price moves the APR too. If your token halves, the USD APR halves with it. Fund the farm from an allocation you can afford to see repriced.
- You can top up but not reclaim. Adding rewards raises the rate for everyone staked. Taking them back is not possible, and top ups are rejected once the farm has ended.
The reward budgeting guide goes deeper on duration trade offs, and the same logic applies to farms.
Choosing the Duration
30 to 90 days suits a launch push. The headline rate is high, the end date is close, and you need a plan for what happens when it stops.
6 to 12 months is the usual choice. Long enough that providers treat the farm as part of the pool rather than a promotion, short enough that you can adjust with a second farm once you have seen how people behave.
12 months and beyond suits projects with a large incentive allocation that want deep liquidity to be a permanent feature of the token.
Whatever you pick, tell providers the end date. Liquidity that was only there for the rewards will leave when they stop, and an announced date is a planned event rather than a surprise.
Lock Period or Flexible
A flexible farm lets providers unstake their LP at any time. Participation is higher and churn is higher.
A locked farm sets a minimum staking period. Fewer providers join, but the ones who do have committed their liquidity for a known window, which is what you actually want from a farm. Because farms run on StakePoint's current engine, claiming rewards part way through a lock does not reset it, so a locked farm does not punish providers for collecting what they have earned.
A short lock is a sensible default for a first farm. You can run a flexible farm and a locked farm on the same LP token if you want to serve both audiences.
How to Create the Farm
Go to stakepoint.app/farming and connect the wallet holding your reward tokens.
Click Create Farm.
Select the LP token providers will stake. Paste the pool link from Raydium, Meteora, Orca or PumpSwap so the farm page links back to where liquidity is added.
Select the reward token and enter the amount going into the reward vault.
Set the farm duration and the minimum lock period, or leave the lock at zero for a flexible farm.
Review the summary, then sign the two transactions. The first creates the farm on-chain and pays the 1 SOL fee, the second initialises it and deposits the rewards.
The farm is live immediately with its own page on the farming explorer, an embeddable widget for your own site, and a Telegram bot your community can add for live stake and unstake alerts.
Stake a small LP position yourself straight away. The USD APR displays once the first stake is in.
Launch Your Farm
Two transactions · 1 SOL · Live in minutes
How the USD APR Is Calculated
Farms involve two tokens with two prices, so a percentage of tokens would mean nothing. StakePoint annualises the reward emission, prices it in USD using the reward token price, divides by the USD value of all staked LP, and shows the result. LP prices come from the Raydium and Meteora pool data, with the reward price from DexScreener and Birdeye.
The figure moves when either price moves and when providers enter or exit. That is the number to put in your announcement, next to the pair, because it is the one a provider can set against the impermanent loss table and decide with.
Telling Providers About It
A farm nobody knows about pays nobody.
- Announce the rate and the pair together. "60% APR on TOKEN/SOL LP, twelve months, rewards paid in TOKEN" tells a provider everything they need.
- Explain the floating rate before it falls. The most common complaint on any farm is the APR dropping as people join. Say up front that it will, and that early providers earn the most.
- Link to the pool and the farm. Add liquidity on the DEX, stake the LP on StakePoint. Two links, pinned.
- Point at the vault. The rewards are on-chain and visible on the farm page. That is a stronger claim than any percentage.
Lock the Liquidity You Own
A farm pays other people to keep their liquidity in. It says nothing about yours. If the project's own LP is unlocked, every provider you recruit is one transaction away from being the only liquidity left.
Lock your own LP tokens before you ask anyone else to stake theirs. Projects that do both have answered the question a provider asks before they commit: will the pool still be here when my lock ends.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between an LP farm and a staking pool?
A staking pool rewards people for holding your token. An LP farm rewards people for providing liquidity to your token's pool. The mechanics are the same on StakePoint, but the staked asset in a farm is an LP token rather than the token itself, and the APR is priced in USD because two tokens are involved.
Which LP tokens can be farmed?
Any fungible SPL LP token: Raydium AMM v4 and CPMM, Meteora DAMM v1 and v2, Orca standard pools and PumpSwap. Concentrated liquidity positions on Raydium CLMM and Meteora DLMM are NFTs and cannot be staked in a farm.
Can I reward in my own token?
Yes. You can reward in your own token, a partner token, USDC or any SPL or Token-2022 token. Native SOL is not supported as a reward token.
What does it cost to create a farm?
1 SOL to create, enforced on-chain, plus the reward tokens you deposit and standard Solana network fees. There is no subscription.
Can the farm run out of rewards?
No. The rewards are deposited upfront and distributed across the farm duration in proportion to what is staked. The farm never pays more than the vault holds over the period it holds it for. The rate falls as more LP is staked rather than the vault emptying early.
Can I add more rewards after launch?
Yes, at any time before the farm ends. The emission recalculates across the remaining time, which raises the APR for everyone currently staked. Top ups after the end date are rejected.
Does claiming rewards reset a provider's lock?
No. Farms track claim and stake timestamps separately, so a provider can claim part way through a lock period without restarting it.
Do providers still earn trading fees while farming?
Yes. Their liquidity stays in the DEX pool the whole time. The farm reward is on top of the fees the pool pays them.
*Create a farm: StakePoint LP Farming. For the provider side, see Solana LP Farming on StakePoint. For the numbers a farm has to beat, see Impermanent Loss on Solana.*