The nine red flags
- Mint authority active: the creator can print unlimited new tokens. Your share shrinks to nothing on demand.
- Freeze authority active: your tokens can be frozen. You watch the chart go up and cannot sell.
- Liquidity not locked or burned: the pool can be withdrawn at any time. That is the classic rug.
- Top 10 wallets hold more than half: a few hands decide the price. One sell, one crater.
- Dev wallet above 10 percent: the creator's exit is bigger than the whole community's.
- Bundled buys at launch: many wallets buying in the same block belong to one operator.
- Insider clusters: wallets funded from the same source, buying together, selling together.
- Socials from yesterday: a fresh X account, an empty Telegram, a website that is one image.
- Metadata that changes: name, image and links can be swapped after you bought. A "mutable" flag is a small warning, not a deal breaker, but note it.
What a good coin looks like on-chain
Mint and freeze authority revoked. Liquidity locked for months or burned. Top ten holders under a third, ideally with the biggest one being the pool itself. A dev wallet under five percent or empty. Buyers spread over minutes and hours, not one block. That does not make a coin a good trade, but it makes it a coin that cannot rug you in the simplest ways.
Beyond the checklist
The checklist catches the lazy rugs. The clever ones pass every technical check and still drain you: slow sells from twenty wallets over days, a "partnership" that never existed, a relaunch under a new ticker. Against those, only two things help: position size and a sell plan you wrote down before you bought.
Automate the nine checksThe coin check runs all of them from eight data sources.