A pump.fun rug is a token whose creator or insiders can take the buyers' money: by dumping a large supply, freezing wallets or taxing sales. Five on-chain checks catch most of them in seconds.
A rug pull is a token launch where the people who control the supply or the contract take value from the buyers. On Solana memecoin launchpads like pump.fun, it rarely looks like a hack. It usually looks like a normal chart that collapses in minutes, because the creator or a small group of wallets sells everything they hold into the buyers' liquidity.
There are two families. Contract traps: the token itself gives someone power over your coins (freeze, mint, transfer tax, permanent delegate). Supply traps: the contract is clean, but a few wallets hold so much that one sale wipes the price. A good check looks at both.
Every SPL token has two optional authorities. Freeze authority lets its holder freeze any token account, so you can buy but never sell. Mint authority lets its holder create new supply at will and sell it into the pool.
Standard pump.fun tokens are created with both revoked, which is why the launchpad became popular. If a token you are about to buy still has a freeze authority, treat it as a trap until proven otherwise. A live mint authority is less immediate but means the supply is not fixed.
Token-2022 is the newer Solana token program. It adds extensions that are useful for real projects and dangerous in memecoins: a transfer fee that can be raised to tax every sale, a transfer hook that runs custom code on every transfer, a permanent delegate that can move tokens out of any wallet, accounts frozen by default, and a pausable switch.
None of these are visible on a price chart. They are visible on chain, in the mint account, which is what TokenGuard reads.
Look at the largest token accounts, excluding the liquidity pool and program accounts. If the top 10 wallets hold more than half of the supply, or a single wallet holds more than 20 %, a few sales can empty the pool. Bundled launches often hide this by spreading the creator's buy across many fresh wallets funded at the same moment.
The creator wallet tells the story. A creator who has already sold the entire initial buy has no reason to support the token. A creator who launched five, ten or twenty tokens in the same week is running a launch machine, not a project. Both signals are public on chain and take seconds to read with the right tools.
Most collapses happen in the first hours. A token created less than an hour ago has no history, and thin liquidity means even a small sale moves the price hard. Young plus thin plus concentrated is the classic profile of a token that will not survive the day.
Yes. On-chain checks catch contract and supply traps, not a team deciding to abandon a project or a coordinated dump from wallets that look independent. A clean result lowers the risk; it never makes a token safe.
No. It removes one trap. Concentration, creator selling and Token-2022 fees are separate risks and need their own checks.
With TokenGuard, about two seconds: paste the address or the pump.fun link in the Telegram bot and you get SAFE, CAUTION or DANGER with the reasons.
See the tokens TokenGuard has checked and what happened to them 24 hours later.