# How to Trade on Photon: Complete Beginner's Guide (2026)

> Step-by-step Photon tutorial: sign up, save your one-time private key, fund with SOL, find a token, set S1/S2/S3 presets, and place your first trade safely.

Source: https://photonguides.com/guides/getting-started/how-to-trade-on-photon

[Photon](/ecosystem/what-is-photon) is a browser-based  Solana trading terminal built by Tiny Astro. It puts the token feed, your wallet, and the buy button on one screen, so you are not tabbing between a scanner and a wallet extension while a price moves. This guide walks the full path from a blank signup screen to a closed position, using only mechanics that Photon's own documentation confirms.

*Disclosure: PhotonGuides may earn a referral commission if you sign up through our link. It costs you nothing extra. Photon charges the same flat 1% either way, and it publishes no [referral discount](/referral), so nobody can offer you one.*

Two things to settle before you start. First, this is a memecoin venue. Most tokens traded here go to zero, and the [fee structure](/guides/fees/photon-fees-explained) means you start every round trip about 2% behind. Second, the wallet Photon creates for you is yours alone. There is no password reset and no support ticket that recovers a lost key.

One moment in this whole process is irreversible: the private key is displayed a single time at signup. Save it correctly and every other mistake is survivable. Lose it and the account and its funds are gone permanently, by Photon's own Terms of Use.

## Before anything else, verify the domain

Photon's canonical domains all sit under `tinyastro.io`. The Solana deployment is at [photon-sol.tinyastro.io](https://photon-sol.tinyastro.io/@Concept211), with `photon-bnb.tinyastro.io` and `photon-base.tinyastro.io` also live, plus a chain-agnostic `photon.tinyastro.io`. The Ethereum deployment now returns a permanent redirect, so treat the ETH documentation as legacy.

Know what the real front page looks like before you need to recognize it in a hurry. This is what loads at the genuine address:

Register what it does not do. Nothing on this page asks you to approve a transaction, and no legitimate Photon page ever will before you have an account. A clone can copy every pixel of the layout, so the page looking correct proves nothing by itself. The address bar is the only thing that does.

PCRisk [documented a live fake-Photon drainer](/security/is-photon-safe) at `speedtrade[.]icu` that mimics the real interface. Connect a wallet to it and a silent drainer empties the balance. A separate clone surfaced at `wwwphoton.com` reusing Photon's own tagline. The most common trick in this category is swapping a dot for a hyphen or the reverse, so `photon.sol.tinyastro.io` and `photon-sol.tinyastro.io` look nearly identical at a glance. Type the address yourself or use a bookmark you created from a verified visit. Never reach Photon through a search ad, a Telegram link, or a reply in your notifications.

There is also no Photon token. Several unrelated projects use the PHOTON and PHO tickers, and any contract address presented to you as "the Photon token" is a scam. Our [ecosystem section](/ecosystem) covers that disambiguation in detail.

## The trade, end to end

## Step 1: Sign up and save the private key

Photon does not ask you to connect an existing wallet the way most Solana DEXes do. It generates a dedicated wallet for the account and shows you the private key exactly once, behind a reveal slider you have to drag deliberately. That slider is a speed bump on purpose. It is the only time that key will ever appear.

Write it down before you touch anything else on the page. Do not photograph the screen. Do not tell yourself you will come back for it.

Photon's Terms of Use state that the company "has no way of granting you access to the site if you lose access to, or control of, your Wallet," and that "you are solely responsible for maintaining the security of your account and control over any usernames, passwords, public and/or private keys." There is no support escalation that gets around this. A lost key is a permanently lost balance.

Copy the key twice into two different places before dismissing the reveal. Then verify what you saved matches character for character. A transposed character in a key you cannot re-display is the same as no key at all.

## Step 2: Store the key somewhere that survives you

A private key is a bearer credential. Whoever holds it controls the wallet, with no second factor between them and your balance. Store it accordingly.

Good options: a reputable password manager entry, an encrypted vault file you actually keep backed up, or paper in a place you would store a passport. Hardware-backed storage is better still if you already run that setup.

Bad options that people use anyway: a screenshot in your phone's camera roll, which syncs to cloud photos by default and puts the key on a server you do not control. A plain text file on the desktop. A note in a chat app. An email to yourself.

The Photon key is exportable, so you can retrieve it later and import it into  Phantom to move funds without going through the terminal at all. That portability cuts both ways: anyone who gets a copy can do the same thing from their own machine. Our [security section](/security) goes deeper on self-custody and key handling.

## Step 3: Fund the wallet with SOL

Photon trades on Solana, so the wallet needs SOL. Two documented paths:

**Send SOL to the generated address.** Copy the Photon wallet address, paste it as the withdrawal destination at your exchange or in your existing wallet, and confirm it is a Solana-network transfer. Send a small test amount first if it is a new address to you. Solana transfers settle in seconds, so the test costs you almost nothing in time.

**Use the Moonpay on-ramp.**  Moonpay is integrated for buying SOL with traditional payment methods, which saves the exchange round trip if you are starting from zero crypto. Card on-ramps carry their own spread and fees on top of Photon's, so it is the convenient option rather than the cheap one.

Every Solana transaction costs a base network fee, plus whatever priority fee and bribe you have configured. Running the wallet balance to zero is the single most common cause of [failed transactions on Photon](/troubleshooting/photon-failed-transactions). If you buy with your entire SOL balance, you may not be able to afford the transaction that sells it. Keep a reserve that is comfortably more than a handful of transactions' worth of fees, and top it up before it gets thin. Our [troubleshooting section](/troubleshooting) covers what a failed transaction actually looks like when this happens.

## Step 4: Find a token, and verify the mint address

Photon gives you four documented ways to find something to trade.

[**Memescope**](/guides/trading/photon-memescope-guide) is the flagship. It is a customizable dashboard of  Pump.fun and Moonshot tokens that you tune with filters: top-10-holder percentage, whether socials are attached, bonding-curve progress, holder count, developer holding percentage, liquidity, volume, market cap, and buy/sell activity. It updates live, pauses on hover so a row does not slide out from under your cursor, and carries a quick-buy button on each entry.

Alongside it, the Live Pairs Feed is the raw stream of new pairs as they appear, the Trending page surfaces what is already moving, and the Token/Pairs page is the detail view you land on once you have an address in hand.

Those Memescope filters are the closest thing Photon gives you to a due-diligence pass. A token where the top ten wallets hold most of the supply, or where the developer still holds a large share, can be dumped on you at will. Filtering those out early removes a category of loss rather than a specific bad trade.

Ticker impersonation is constant on Solana. Anyone can launch a token called BONK or PENGU, and cloned tickers frequently appear in feeds within minutes of a real token trending. The mint address is the only unique identifier. Get it from the project's own verified channel or from an established data source, paste it into Photon directly, and read the whole string rather than eyeballing the first and last four characters.

Our [markets section](/markets) tracks established Solana pairs with durable liquidity if you want to start somewhere less volatile than a fresh launch.

## Step 5: Configure your presets before you need them

Photon exposes three trading profiles named **S1, S2, and S3**. Each one stores a full configuration: MEV protection mode, priority fee, bribe, and slippage tolerance. You switch between them rather than editing individual fields mid-trade, which is the point. Fast markets are the worst possible time to be adjusting a slippage box.

Some third-party guides call these "degen," "normal," and "custom." That naming appears nowhere in Photon's documentation. They are S1, S2, S3.

### Smart-MEV Protection

Photon's Smart-MEV Protection has two modes, and both work by routing your transaction based on the size of the bribe attached to it.

**Fast Mode** sends bribes under 0.001 SOL directly to  Jito, and routes anything larger through Bloxroute. **Secure Mode** applies the same logic with the threshold set at 0.002 SOL.

Alongside those, two speed settings control how the fees themselves are chosen. **Default Speed** uses your configured values as-is. **Auto Speed** adjusts the priority fee and bribe automatically based on recent successful transactions, which is generally the better setting when network conditions are moving faster than you can react to them.

### Priority fee, bribe, and slippage

| Setting | What it does | Who receives it |
|---|---|---|
| Priority fee | Pays extra for faster inclusion during congestion | Solana validators |
| Bribe | Pays Jito validators to prioritize your bundle | Jito validators |
| Slippage | The worst price you will accept before the trade reverts | Nobody, it is a tolerance |
| Photon fee | Flat 1% of the initial token used | Photon |

The first three are yours to set and are **not Photon fees**. Plenty of competitor comparisons blur that line and quote Photon's cost as if the bribe were part of it. Read our [fees section](/guides/fees) for the full arithmetic.

Slippage deserves a note. Set it too tight on an illiquid token and your transaction reverts, costing you the network fee for nothing. Set it too loose on a thin pool and you hand the difference to whoever is on the other side. The right number depends on the pool you are trading into, which is why you store several rather than picking one.

Configure S1, S2, and S3 once, while nothing is happening. Give yourself a conservative profile for established pairs and a faster one for launches. Switching presets mid-market is a single click. Reasoning about slippage tolerance mid-market is not.

## Step 6: Place the buy and understand what you paid

With a token open and a preset selected, entering an amount and confirming is the easy part. Reading the bill correctly is the part most beginners skip.

Photon's documentation is unambiguous: **1% of the initial token used for every buy and sell transaction.** The worked example in the docs is a 5 SOL buy incurring a 0.05 SOL fee. There are no volume tiers, no documented discounts, and no published referral rate that lowers it.

On top of that flat 1% you pay the Solana base network fee, your priority fee, your Jito bribe, and whatever slippage the fill actually took. Those four vary per transaction and per market condition. The 1% does not.

## Step 7: Manage the position

**My Holdings** is the live view of what you own and what each position is doing. That is where you go to sell manually.

For anything you do not want to sit and watch, Photon documents two order types.

**Limit orders** cover the standard set. You can buy a dip by specifying a percentage drop, an exact market cap, or a target line dragged on the chart. You can set a stop loss and a take profit. Orders carry expirations of 24, 48, or 72 hours, and each order can carry its own priority fee and bribe. Usefully, when an order fills at 100% allocation, Photon automatically cancels the paired order, so a filled take profit will not leave a stale stop loss hanging on a position you no longer hold.

**DCA orders** let you spread an entry or exit over time. You set a recurring buy or sell as a SOL amount or a percentage, an interval in minutes or hours, a total number of orders, an optional market-cap range to stay within, and the same 24/48/72-hour expiry.

There are also **auto-buy and auto-sell triggers** tied to market-cap percentage change, configured per preset.

Setting a stop loss at entry is worth the thirty seconds. A stop that exists is a decision you made calmly. A stop you intended to add is a decision you will make at 3am while a chart drops.

The [trading section](/guides/trading) covers each of these order types in depth.

## Step 8: Sell, and do the round-trip math

Selling takes the same flat 1%. Put both sides together and the picture is straightforward.

| Position size | Buy fee (1%) | Sell fee (1%) | Total to Photon |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 SOL | 0.01 SOL | ~0.01 SOL | ~0.02 SOL |
| 5 SOL | 0.05 SOL | ~0.05 SOL | ~0.10 SOL |
| 20 SOL | 0.20 SOL | ~0.20 SOL | ~0.40 SOL |

Roughly 2% per round trip, before slippage and before your priority fee and bribe. A token has to move about 2% in your favor before you are at break-even, and a trader who wins half their trades at even sizing loses steadily to fees alone.

This is Photon's real competitive weakness in 2026. Rivals publish tiered and referral-discounted schedules; Photon publishes a flat 1% with no tiers and no documented discount. It matters most if you trade frequently in small size, because the fee is proportional but your edge usually is not. Our [comparison section](/compare) puts the published schedules side by side.

Fee drag is the cost beginners underestimate most. Twenty round trips at 2% each leaves you with about two thirds of your starting capital even if every trade breaks even on price. The defense is fewer trades held longer, not better entries.

## Multi-wallet: running more than one

Photon supports up to **five active wallets** on an account. You can archive a wallet you are done with and unarchive it later, split a deposit across several wallets at once, and buy or sell from any of them.

The practical use is separation. Keeping a long-term position in one wallet and a rotating launch-hunting balance in another means a bad approval or a mistake in the risky wallet does not touch the rest. Each wallet has its own key and its own exposure.

Multi-wallet covers your own wallets only. Photon does not document any feature for tracking other people's wallets or copying their trades, whatever third-party reviews claim.

## Mobile: there is no app

Photon has no native iOS or Android app and no Telegram bot. Anything in an app store or a Telegram search claiming to be Photon is fake, and you should assume it exists to collect your key.

The documented mobile route is  Phantom. You export your Photon private key, import it into Phantom on your phone, and open Photon inside Phantom's in-app browser. Photon's own documentation says the platform "is best experienced on the Phantom Wallet Browser."

Handle that export with the same care as the original reveal. Exporting a key means it exists on your clipboard and in a second app, which is two more places it can leak from.

## Being honest about the risk

Two facts belong in a beginner's guide even though no vendor page includes them.

**Most tokens you will see on Memescope go to zero.** That is the base rate of the launch market, not a pessimistic framing of it. The filters help you avoid the most obvious traps, and they do not turn a lottery into an investment.

**Photon is past its peak.** DefiLlama's fee data shows Photon launched in January 2024, peaked in January 2025 at roughly $84.6M in monthly fees, and now runs around $0.5M per month, holding about 1.26% of its cohort. It has collected more than $440M in lifetime fees and it still works exactly as documented. But it lost the share war, and the flat 1% with no published referral tier is a large part of why. Knowing that is more useful than a review that pretends the ranking never changed.

None of that makes Photon a bad tool. It makes it a tool with a specific cost profile that you should choose deliberately rather than by default.

## Where to go next

- [Getting started guides](/guides/getting-started) for the signup and funding details
- Trading guides for Memescope filters, limit orders, DCA, and the S1/S2/S3 presets
- Fees for the full cost breakdown and fee-drag math
- Security for key handling, exports, and spotting fake Photon sites
- Troubleshooting for failed transactions, slippage errors, and deposit problems
- Comparisons for how Photon's published fee schedule stacks up
- Referral for exactly what our link does and does not get you
- [The full guide index](/guides) if you would rather browse than follow a path

Every claim on this page traces to Photon's own documentation, its Terms of Use, DefiLlama's fee data, or a named security report. Where the documentation is silent, we say so rather than filling the gap. More on that approach on our [about page](/about).

## FAQ

### How much does it cost to trade on Photon?

Photon charges a flat 1% of the initial token used on every buy and every sell, per its official documentation. A full round trip is therefore about 2% before slippage. Solana network fees, the priority fee, and the Jito bribe are separate costs that you set yourself, and they are not Photon platform fees.

### What happens if I lose my Photon private key?

Nobody can restore it. Photon shows the private key exactly once during signup and you save it manually. Photon's Terms of Use state that the company has no way of granting you access to the site if you lose access to, or control of, your wallet. There is no email reset and no support recovery path.

### Does Photon have a mobile app?

No. There is no native iOS or Android app and no Telegram bot. Photon's documented mobile route is to import your Photon private key into the Phantom wallet and open Photon inside Phantom's in-app browser. Anything in an app store claiming to be Photon should be treated as fake.

### Do I need a Phantom wallet to use Photon?

Not to start. Photon generates its own Solana wallet for your account at signup, and you fund that wallet directly. Phantom becomes relevant in two cases: trading from a phone through Phantom's in-app browser, and moving funds out by importing your exported Photon key into Phantom.

### Is Photon a good place for a beginner to start trading memecoins?

It is a workable terminal with clear documentation, but it is not a gentle one. Photon is a memecoin venue where most tokens go to zero, the 1% each way fee is high relative to competitors that publish discounted tiers, and every mistake is final because the wallet is self-custodial. Start with an amount you would not mind losing entirely.