Types of Crypto Rug Pulls: Liquidity Pulls, Honeypots, Minting & More
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The deployer withdraws the liquidity pool it created, so there is nothing left to sell into. Price gaps to near zero in a single transaction.
Signal to check: LP token ownership — burned, in a recognised locker with a future unlock date, or still in the deployer's wallet.
Buys succeed, sells revert for everyone except whitelisted addresses. The chart only goes up because exit is impossible.
Signal to check: Simulated sell result, transfer restrictions, blacklist function, sell tax set at or near 100%.
The owner mints new supply after launch and sells it into the existing pool, diluting every holder.
Signal to check: Mint authority on Solana, or a still-callable mint function / upgradeable proxy admin on EVM chains.
A small buy tax attracts entries while the sell tax — or a tax the owner can raise later — takes most of your exit.
Signal to check: Buy tax vs sell tax as separate figures, and whether the tax rate is owner-adjustable.
Wallets funded from a single source buy the launch, then sell together once retail volume arrives.
Signal to check: Top-holder share, wallets funded by a common address, purchases clustered in the first blocks.
Transfers are frozen or specific wallets blacklisted, trapping holders while insiders exit freely.
Signal to check: Freeze authority on Solana; pause, blacklist or transfer-hook functions on EVM chains.
The pool number looks healthy but most of it is the project's own token, or the pool is spread across shells with no real quote-asset depth.
Signal to check: Quote-asset side of the pool, market-cap-to-liquidity ratio, and where the volume actually trades.
No single malicious transaction. The team sells gradually, stops delivering and disappears; the price bleeds out.
Signal to check: Steady creator-wallet outflows, dead socials, falling holder count against thin liquidity.
Liquidity rug pulls in detail
Whoever deposits into a pool receives LP tokens representing that deposit. Those LP tokens are the claim on the liquidity — so the real question is never "how big is the pool" but "who can withdraw it".
- Burned LP — sent to a dead address. Nobody can withdraw. Strongest state.
- Locked LP — held by a locker contract until a stated date. Check the unlock date and the share locked, not just that a lock exists.
- Unlocked LP — held by the deployer or an active owner. Withdrawal is possible at any moment. Not proof of intent, but liquidity protection cannot be confirmed.
Background reading: what a token locker does and how liquidity works in crypto.
Honeypots and sell restrictions
A honeypot is a contract-level trap. Because buying works normally, nothing in the price feed hints at the problem — the giveaway is that the sell side of the tape is empty or limited to a few repeat addresses.
Typical implementations
- A blacklist or allowlist gate inside the transfer function.
- A maximum sell amount or per-wallet cooldown that makes exiting impractical.
- A sell tax set so high the proceeds are effectively zero.
- An upgradeable proxy whose implementation is swapped for a restrictive one after launch.
On EVM chains a simulated transaction can test the sell path directly. On Solana the equivalent checks are freeze authority and Token-2022 transfer hooks. See what a blacklist function is.
Malicious minting and upgradeable contracts
Dilution is the quietest rug. Nothing looks wrong until a large new balance appears and starts selling. Two permissions matter: the ability to create supply, and the ability to change the code.
- Solana: mint authority should be null. If it is still set, supply is not fixed.
- EVM: look for a mint function reachable by the owner, and for a proxy pattern where an admin can replace the implementation entirely.
An upgradeable contract is not automatically malicious — plenty of legitimate projects use one — but it means today's audit does not describe tomorrow's code.
Insider supply and bundled launches
Supply concentration converts a market into a single person's decision. Bundling is how it is hidden: rather than one wallet buying 40%, twenty wallets funded from the same address buy 2% each, so no holder looks alarming in isolation.
Read more on bundled token launches and wallet clustering.
Which checks catch which rug
A liquidity check does not catch a honeypot. A contract check does not catch an insider dump. That is why a single "is it safe" answer is misleading and why coverage matters: a verdict is only as strong as the number of modules that actually returned data.
The practical order to run these in is covered in how to detect a rug pull before buying.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most common type of rug pull?›
Liquidity removal is the most common on retail meme-coin launches because it needs no special contract code — the deployer simply withdraws the pool it created. Honeypots are more common where contracts are custom-written rather than launched from a standard launchpad template.
What is the difference between a honeypot and a liquidity rug pull?›
A honeypot blocks you from selling while the pool still exists — the restriction lives in the token contract. A liquidity rug pull leaves selling technically possible but removes the pool you would sell into. The first is a contract-permission problem, the second is a liquidity-ownership problem.
Can a token be renounced and still rug?›
Yes. Renouncing ownership removes future contract changes, but it does not lock liquidity, redistribute supply, or stop insider wallets from dumping. Renounced ownership plus unlocked liquidity plus concentrated supply is still a high-risk setup.
Check a Token for Rug Pull Risk
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