Nearly all of pump.fun's tokens end in rug pulls, a market-surveillance firm found

A May 2025 report from market-surveillance firm Solidus Labs put a hard number on a soft suspicion: 98.6% of the tokens ever launched on pump.fun, the Solana memecoin factory, were rug pulls or pump-and-dump schemes — a framing the platform disputes. CoinDesk covered the findings.

The raw counts are staggering. More than 7 million tokens had been issued on the platform since its January 2024 launch, Solidus found, yet only about 97,000 of them ever held even $1,000 in liquidity, per CoinDesk. That survival rate is well under two in a hundred; the rest were, in effect, born to die.

The scale, and the small print

The mechanics are mundane. A deployer creates a token, seeds a shallow pool, promotes it just long enough to attract buyers, then pulls the liquidity — leaving holders with tokens no one will buy. That cycle can be repeated thousands of times a day, which is why the danger is ubiquity rather than any single heist.

Most individual rugs are tiny, and that is the point. Solidus reported that 93% of the launchpad's Raydium liquidity pools — roughly 361,000 of them — showed 'soft rug pull' characteristics, with a median value near $2,800, according to CoinDesk. The largest single rug it identified was about $1.9 million.

The aggregate still adds up. A separate February 2025 report from Merkle Science, cited by CoinDesk, estimated that $500 million was lost to rug pulls and scams across crypto in 2024 — a reminder that a million small wipeouts can rival a single headline theft.

pump.fun rejected the framing. Spokesperson Troy Gravitt told CoinDesk that 'What Solidus Labs lacks is a basic understanding of memecoins,' arguing that memecoins, like most art forms, carry little inherent long-term value and that the platform simply connects willing buyers and sellers.

Protect yourself

• On a permissionless launchpad, the base rate is against you: treat every new token as a likely rug until proven otherwise.
• Check liquidity depth and whether it is locked; a pool of a few thousand dollars can be pulled in one transaction.
• 'It graduated' or 'it's trending' is momentum, not safety — most tokens that spike still round-trip to zero.
• Never commit money you can't lose to a token that is hours old and controlled by anonymous deployers.

None of this argues that every memecoin buyer is a victim or every deployer a criminal. It is an argument about odds. When a firm that watches the chain full-time says fewer than two launches in a hundred survive as real markets, the burden of proof sits squarely on the token, not the buyer.

— Sources: [CoinDesk](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/05/07/98-of-tokens-on-pump-fun-have-been-rug-pulls-or-an-act-of-fraud-new-report-says)