Fundamentals · updated
What is a rug pull?
The routes to the same outcome, and which of them are observable in advance.
In short
- Four common routes, one outcome: holders left unable to exit at value.
- Intent is not observable on-chain; capability is.
- The preconditions are checkable in advance, which is the whole point.
Four routes to the same place
In a liquidity rug, whoever holds the LP position withdraws the pooled assets and the price collapses because there is nothing left to trade against. It is fast, it needs no special contract code, and it is the most common version.
In a supply rug, a wallet holding a large share sells into the pool until it is drained. The contract may be entirely ordinary; the distribution is what does the damage.
In a permissions rug, the contract owner blocks selling, blacklists holders or raises the sell tax while exiting themselves. This is the version that overlaps with honeypots.
A slow rug does none of these dramatically. Value leaks out over weeks through taxes routed to the team, quiet mints, or simple abandonment. It is the hardest to name at any single moment and it ends in the same place.
Capability, not intent
No scan can establish that somebody plans to do any of this. Intent is not on-chain data, and a tool claiming to detect it is selling something it does not have.
What is observable is whether the capability exists and how concentrated it is: who can remove liquidity, who holds enough supply to matter, what the contract permits the owner to do, and whether this deployer has produced tokens that already failed this way. A token where no single party holds any of those is in a different position from one where a single key holds all four.
The limit of structural checks
A token can pass every structural check and still go to zero, because nobody wanted it. Locked liquidity, renounced ownership, distributed supply and a clean deployer describe a market that is hard to rob. They say nothing about whether it is worth anything.
Keeping those two questions separate is the most useful habit in this whole subject. Structural risk and value risk are different, and most disappointment comes from a clean answer to the first being read as an answer to the second.