How to spot a rug pull before you buy

Mint authority

If the mint authority is still active, whoever controls it can create unlimited new tokens at any time and sell them into your liquidity. Your position is diluted to nothing.

On a legitimate project this is revoked shortly after launch. If it is still live on a token that has been trading for a while, that is a deliberate choice by the deployer. Treat it as a red flag.

Freeze authority

Freeze authority lets the deployer stop transfers on specific accounts — including yours. You could buy in, watch the price rise, and find you cannot sell.

There are legitimate uses in regulated stablecoins. On an anonymous memecoin there is essentially no good reason for it to be active.

Liquidity: locked or burned?

The trading pool is what lets you sell. If the deployer holds the LP tokens, they can withdraw all of it in one transaction — the classic rug. The price goes to zero and there is no one to sell to.

Look for LP tokens burned or locked in a time-locked contract. 'Locked for 30 days' means exactly that: you should know when the lock expires.

Holder concentration

Check the top holders. If ten wallets hold 70% of supply, ten people decide whether your position survives. Watch for many wallets holding suspiciously similar amounts — a sign one entity split their allocation to look decentralised.

Honeypots: can you actually sell?

Some contracts allow buying but block selling, or apply a sell tax so punitive it amounts to the same thing. The chart looks like it only goes up, because nobody is able to sell.

Simulation tools can test a sell before you commit real money. If buys succeed and sells consistently fail, leave.

What none of this tells you

A token can pass every check here and still lose 99% of its value. These checks screen out deliberate traps; they say nothing about whether something is a good investment. Most memecoins with clean contracts still go to zero, just more slowly.