What Are the Chances This Token Rugs? MemeAssist's Live Data

By the MemeAssist Research Desk · Published 2026-08-04 · Updated 2026-08-04 · 8 min read

Among freshly graduated pump.fun tokens that pass a full safety screen, MemeAssist measured a 15.1% rug rate across 53 live trades in July–August 2026. Among tokens from first-launch creators the rate climbs to 42%. The base rate for unscreened launches is far higher — academic research suggests the majority of new DEX tokens are abandoned or malicious. Screening cuts risk; it does not eliminate it.

The baseline token rug rate: what the real numbers say

Most quoted rug rates are vague. Ours are not. MemeAssist runs an automated paper-trading desk that enters freshly graduated pump.fun tokens in real time — same feeds, same prices, every decision and outcome logged. The figures below come from the 53 trades that closed between July 25 and August 2, 2026.

Every token in the cohort had already passed our full safety gate: LP burned at graduation, mint and freeze authority revoked, no hostile Token-2022 extensions, holder concentration within limits, creator wallet not blacklisted. These are the survivors of screening — not random launches.

Overall rug rate: 15.1% — 8 of 53 trades ended as rugs despite passing every check.
Profit rate: 57% — 30 of 53 trades closed in profit.
Median time to rug: ~89 minutes from entry near graduation.
90th-percentile time to rug: ~10.6 hours — late rugs exist, but they're the tail.
Average loss on a rugged position: −72% — median entry-to-dead time of 12.7 minutes, average 23 minutes.

How creator history changes the odds

The single most powerful variable that shifts rug probability is the creator wallet's history. Our live data on closed trades breaks down cleanly:

Creator type	Trades	Rug rate
First-time launcher	69	~42%
Passed full gate (all creators)	53	15.1%
Blacklisted creator (serial rugs)	0 entered	100% rejected

First-launch creators are not safe — their token has no track record, which means the gate passes them by default when it shouldn't necessarily. The engine auto-rejects 1,837 serial-creator graduations, including 336 from wallets with 50+ prior launches. The current blacklist of confirmed ruggers — 53 wallets — has blocked 252 candidate entries. Every entry that blacklist prevented had at least a 15% chance of being a rug, and the known-bad creator base rate was 100%.

Full creator-check methodology: How to Check a Solana Token's Creator Wallet.

What the unscreened base rate looks like

Our 15% figure is for tokens that cleared the bar. For unscreened launches the picture is worse. Academic research on DEX token launches — including the widely-cited Mazorra et al. study "Do Not Rug Me" — estimates that the majority of new tokens are abandoned or malicious. Chainalysis has consistently ranked rug pulls among the top forms of crypto fraud by volume.

Pump.fun's graduation filter itself acts as a partial screen: only ~1-2% of all tokens launched on the bonding curve ever graduate to Raydium. Graduation requires real buying pressure to move the bonding curve, which filters out the cheapest, fastest ghost launches. The coins our desk trades have already cleared this hurdle.

How each risk factor shifts the probability

No single factor is deterministic, but in our telemetry the following each correlate with elevated rug rate:

High holder concentration

Tokens where the top 10 wallets (excluding pools) hold over 50% of supply have a meaningfully higher rug rate in our data. At 70%+ it approaches certainty — there's no market, just one group of people with a price feed. Top-10 Holder Concentration: The #1 Rug Signal covers the full distribution.

Bundled launch

High bundler counts — wallets funded from one source buying in the launch block — were our 4th most common rejection flag (160 rejections in one week of telemetry). Bundled supply behaves exactly like a concentrated wallet when it's time to exit; the number of addresses is theater.

Token-2022 extensions

Transfer hooks and permanent delegates were logged in 58 and 45 rejections respectively. These are honeypot mechanisms. The rug rate for tokens carrying these extensions in active form is functionally 100% from the buyer's perspective — you can buy but cannot sell.

Copycat tickers and narrative-chasing launches

Post-mortems on our 8 rugs showed an over-representation of copycat tokens — launches riding another coin's ticker within hours of it trending. In our data, copycat patterns now trigger extra scrutiny because the operators use narrative cycles to maximize exit liquidity.

What a 15% rug rate means for position sizing

At 15% incidence, a rug is not an edge case — it's one in six trades. If each rugged trade costs you 100% of the position (which it does; average in our data is −72%, and the true rug closes near zero), the math is simple: any individual position large enough to hurt on a total loss is too big.

Our desk's sizing rule: cap each entry so that a single typical winner (which in our cohort averaged about +11% on mechanical take-profit exits) pays back more than one rug takes. That makes rug events a normal operating cost, not a crisis. Full exit framework: When to Sell a Solana Memecoin.

How MemeAssist grades rug risk

The Rug Risk score in a MemeAssist report synthesizes the above factors into a single headline number: holder concentration, mint and freeze authority status, LP burn status, bundler count, creator history, wash-trade ratios and liquidity depth. The score is calibrated against the outcomes our own desk has logged — not self-reported data or hand-picked case studies. Paste any Solana mint address in the free analyzer and you'll see how the token stacks up against the profile of the 15% that rugged even after passing the gate.

Frequently asked questions

What percentage of Solana memecoins rug?

Among tokens that pass a full safety screen (burned LP, revoked authorities, acceptable holder spread), MemeAssist measured a 15.1% rug rate across 53 live trades in July–August 2026. Among first-launch creators, 42% rugged. For unscreened new launches, academic research suggests the majority are abandoned or malicious.

Does a token passing a rug checker mean it's safe?

No. Rug checkers close the contract-level attack vectors but cannot stop insiders from dumping concentrated supply they legitimately hold. 15.1% of our screened cohort still rugged. Use screening as a filter for obvious bad actors, plus small positions and fast exits for the rest.

Are first-time creator wallets safer than repeat creators?

Not necessarily — first-launch creators rugged 42% of trades in our closed-trade data. A clean history is the absence of evidence, not evidence of absence. The serial-creator check removes the worst offenders; it doesn't validate first-timers.

How long does it take for a token to rug after graduation?

In our live data on freshly graduated pump.fun tokens, the median rug hit about 89 minutes after entry near graduation. Half of all rugs in the cohort fired within that window. The 90th percentile was ~10.6 hours — late rugs exist, but front-loading your risk management in the first two hours is well-supported by the data.

How should I size a memecoin position given a 15% rug rate?

Small enough that a 100% loss doesn't materially hurt your account. At 15% incidence, zero-out events happen roughly one in six trades — that's a routine cost, not a tail risk. Cap each entry so a single winning trade pays back more than one rug takes, and you can survive the variance.