98.6% of Tokens on the Hottest Launchpad Are Scams. The Fix Is Almost Insultingly Boring.

Almost every token minted on crypto's busiest launchpad is a scam. Not a risky bet, not a long shot — a scam, engineered to take your money. Research from Solidus Labs found that 98.6% of tokens launched on pump.fun eventually turn into scams, either through liquidity drains or rapid creator sell-offs. Read that number again. The base rate of a new memecoin is fraud, and the exceptions are statistical noise.

What makes that figure damning isn't its size. It's that the defenses against the most common attacks have existed for years, work reliably, and are dull enough that most traders skip them in the rush to buy a dog with a hat.

The machine is built for speed, not safety

Pump.fun industrialized token creation. Anyone can spin up a fully functional memecoin in under a minute for roughly $2 — no code, just a logo, a name, and a description. The frictionlessness is the product. It's also the vulnerability. When minting a token costs less than a coffee and takes less time, the supply of tokens explodes and the supply of scrupulous founders does not.

The economics reward the platform regardless of outcome. Pump.fun became the first application in Solana's history to cross $1 billion in cumulative revenue, earning its cut on the way up whether a token graduates to a real market or collapses into a creator's wallet by lunchtime. The house wins on volume. The 98.6% is someone else's problem.

To be fair to the platform, it did wire in one structural protection: tokens that graduate have their liquidity pool tokens locked, so that specific pool's liquidity can't simply be yanked. That's a genuine guardrail. The trouble is that the rug-pull playbook has more than one move, and locking a graduated pool addresses only the crudest one.

Rug pulls, honeypots, and slow bleeds

A rug pull in its classic form is brutally simple. A team seeds a token with liquidity, lets buyers pile in, then withdraws the liquidity and disappears, leaving holders with a coin they can't sell. Variants abound: honeypots that let you buy but not sell, contracts with hidden mint functions that print unlimited new supply, and teams that simply dump their own enormous unlocked allocation the moment the price ticks up.

The losses are not trivial. Rug pulls account for roughly 35% of all crypto scam losses, with billions drained across chains in a single year. And the damage isn't only financial. Every viral rug confirms the outsider's suspicion that the whole field is a casino with a rigged wheel, which makes life harder for the people building things that aren't scams.

The boring fixes that actually work

Here's the deflating truth. The two attacks responsible for most of that 98.6% — pulled liquidity and dumped team tokens — are solved problems. The solutions are unglamorous infrastructure that has been available for years.

The first is locking liquidity in a way the team cannot reverse. When a project's liquidity is time-locked through a neutral third party, the founder physically cannot withdraw it on a whim; the contract won't let them until the lock expires. Services like Team Finance exist precisely to do this — lock liquidity pool tokens and vest team allocations so the most common exit scam becomes mechanically impossible rather than merely promised. A locked pool is a claim you can verify on-chain in seconds, not a Discord pinky-swear.

The second is vesting the team's own tokens. A founder who can sell their entire allocation on day one will, often, do exactly that. Vesting stretches that allocation over months or years, aligning the team with holders instead of handing them a trapdoor. Again, this is not new science. It's the same logic venture investors have used for decades, ported to a contract.

When projects route their launches through a vetted process — the model behind something like the TrustSwap Launchpad, where locked liquidity and vesting are conditions of listing rather than afterthoughts — the rug-pull attack surface shrinks dramatically. None of this guarantees a token goes up. Nothing does. It just removes the specific mechanisms that let a founder steal the float and vanish.

So why does nobody use them?

Because friction is the enemy of a memecoin. The entire appeal of a 60-second launch is that there's no waiting, no diligence, no locked anything. Asking a degen to check whether liquidity is time-locked before aping in is like asking someone at a slot machine to read the payout odds. The information is available. The mood is not.

There's a darker reason too. A meaningful share of launches want the option to rug. Locked liquidity and vested teams aren't oversights for those projects — they're obstacles to the plan. The absence of protection is a signal, and the market has trained itself to ignore signals in favor of momentum.

A legal reckoning may force the issue where common sense hasn't. Pump.fun faces a $500 million lawsuit alleging an insider-driven system that gave privileged participants early access to new tokens, with a pivotal decision expected in January 2026. Meanwhile the meme market itself has cooled, with a heavy June supply release landing into weaker demand. Cold markets have a way of clearing out the launches that only ever made sense when everything went up.

The standard already exists; the will doesn't

The frustrating part of crypto's scam problem is that it's rarely a technology gap. It's a behavior gap. We have the contracts to lock liquidity, the schedules to vest teams, and the explorers to verify both before risking a cent. The 98.6% persists not because the defenses are missing but because the culture of the fastest-growing launch venue treats those defenses as speed bumps.

That can change, and history suggests it changes the same way every consumer-protection norm does: slowly, then through a lawsuit, then suddenly. At some point "is the liquidity locked?" becomes the first question a buyer asks rather than the last, the way "is this site HTTPS?" quietly became table stakes for the web. The tooling is ready for that world. The question is whether traders decide they want it before the next viral rug teaches another cohort the lesson the data already spells out in plain numbers.