How to spot a Solana rug

A rug is usually visible before the chart dies. These are the checks. They can be wrong. A pass is not safety.

Most Solana rugs are boring. Someone left mint authority on. Someone can freeze your account. Someone can pull the pool. Someone shipped a Token-2022 hook that rewrites the transfer. You can read all of that on-chain before you click buy. The drama is usually social. The mechanic is usually sitting in the mint account.

Paste a CA into the Solana token rug check. You get the same score a row on this board would wear. Higher is safer. Under 40 we stamp RISKY. A flagged rugged token or a live transfer hook zeros the whole thing.

This is not RugCheck's public number piped through. Their score_normalised is a risk score. USDC comes back around 1. BONK around 96. If we used that, every badge on the board would be upside down.

What the score is made of

100 points if everything is clean. Risky means under 40. Hook or a rugged flag: 0, full stop. Conflicting sources: we keep the math, then multiply by 0.7.

Mint revoked 25. Freeze revoked 25. LP lock/burn up to 20 (scaled to the percent locked). Top-10 concentration up to 15 (better when the top ten hold less). No transfer tax 10 (a tax eats that slice). Holder count up to 5 (full at 1,000+). That is the whole machine. There is no secret "vibes" term.

Mint authority

If mint authority is a pubkey, that pubkey can call MintTo whenever it wants. Infinite supply. Oldest trick on any chain. Revoked (null) is the only pass. 25 points on our score, or zero.

Teams will tell you they "need mint for CEX listings." Sometimes that is even true. It is still a loaded gun. Treat a live mint as a live mint.

Freeze authority

Freeze lets the authority lock a token account. Yours, a market maker's, a burner's. You cannot sell a frozen bag. On this board a frozen #1 also gets no crown burn, because the keeper will not feed a trap. Another 25 points, or zero.

A lot of "safe" 2022 tokens still ship with freeze on because the default template left it there. Default is not a strategy.

LP lock or burn

If they can pull the pool, the chart is a costume. We want at least 80% of LP locked or burned. That slice is worth up to 20 points, scaled. Below 80 the check fails even if other stuff looks clean.

Locked at a locker you have never heard of is still better than unlocked. Burned is cleaner. A 4% lock with a thread about "we locked the rest in our hearts" is unlocked.

Top 10 holders

Over 40% in ten wallets is a dump button. We score concentration as a slope, up to 15 points. "Diamond hands" is not a dataset. A bundled launch that looks like 800 holders and is actually eight people is how you eat a 90% candle with no news.

We do not print a "dev wallet %." RugCheck will give you creatorBalance. The creator emptied that wallet 40 minutes after launch. Showing it would be a lie with a decimal point.

Transfer tax and Token-2022 hooks

A transfer fee skims every sell. Annoying. We knock the tax points down from 10. A Token-2022 transfer hook is worse. The hook program can rewrite the transfer. That is the actual Solana honeypot, not a cartoon devil in the name. Hook present, score is 0. Same if a source already flagged the mint as rugged.

Holder count

Under 1,000 is a room. It costs a few points, not the badge. Thin books still dump. A 10-holder "community" with revoked mint is still a room.

Update authority and the jpeg

Mint and freeze are the guns. Update / metadata authority is the costume shop. If they still hold it, they can change the name, the symbol, and the picture after you ape. A rug that keeps the CA and swaps the art is how people send bags to the wrong chart. Our score does not ding that. Look at the metadata authority on Solscan yourself if the picture is half the thesis.

Pump curve vs a real pool

A coin still on the pump.fun bonding curve has no Raydium-style LP to lock. The "exit" is the curve and the migrate button, not a wallet sitting on LP tokens. After it graduates, look at the new pool the way you would any AMM: who holds the LP, is it locked, is it burned. Applying an 80% LP rule to a curve that has not migrated yet is how you pass something that is still a one-sided book.

A 100% transfer tax is a honeypot even without a hook. You can buy. You cannot sell for anything a human would call proceeds. We already knock tax points down. Read the fee bps anyway.

Permanent delegate and the other Token-2022 knives

Token-2022 can ship a permanent delegate: a pubkey that can move or burn your tokens without asking. That is not freeze and it is not a hook, and our score does not have a dedicated line for it yet. If you see a delegate on the mint extensions, treat it like a backdoor until you have a reason not to. Confidential transfers hide amounts. Nice for privacy. Useless if you are trying to read a rug from a public explorer.

Lockers: Streamflow, Raydium locker, team-finance clones. A lock NFT in a random wallet is not a lock. Open the locker page, match the pool, match the unlock date. A lock that ends Friday is unlocked Friday. Burned LP (LP tokens sent through Burn) is the clean version because nobody can unlock it.

Bundles on the holders tab: five wallets that got the same size at the same slot from the same funding wallet are one person. Explorers will still count five holders. This is why holder count is only 5 points. The top-10 % is the number that actually bites.

If you want to read it yourself

Solscan the mint. Token tab: mint authority and freeze authority should say disabled or none, not a wallet. Holders tab: look at the top ten as a percent of supply, and whether a few of them are labeled pool or locker. The pool account on DexScreener: if LP is sitting in a normal wallet, that is unlocked. Token-2022 extensions show up as extra fields. A transfer hook program ID is the one that should make you close the tab.

Our tool is those checks plus RugCheck and GoPlus, mashed into one number so a row can wear a badge. RugCheck is the mint/LP/holder primitive source. GoPlus is where the transfer hook flag comes from. When they fight about authorities we degrade instead of picking a winner. The explorer is still the ground truth when the APIs fight.

What the number will not save you from

Phishing sites. "Support" in DMs. Bundles that look like organic holders. A clean mint whose admin posts a malicious transaction to "claim airdrop." Stale API data. Two vendors disagreeing. When RugCheck and GoPlus fight about authorities we multiply the score by 0.7 and write CONFLICTING DATA on the row. We would rather look unsure than pick a side and be wrong in public.

Rank is not the score

On the board, rank is who paid. Score is a bot. A #1 skull is still #1. We do not block risky coins. We disclose them. If you want the walkthrough for putting a mint on the hill anyway, that is how to list a Solana memecoin.

A PASS IS NOT SAFETY. A LISTING IS NOT A BLESSING.