Unit 4 · Level 1 · First investigations
Anatomy of a rug pull
A rug pull is theft with a public paper trail. Squid Game token (Nov 2021): holders were code-blocked from selling while the team cashed out millions. AnubisDAO (Oct 2021): roughly $60M left the funding wallet within hours of launch. In every case, the fatal transactions sat on the explorer for anyone to read, before and after.
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What you get asked
Reconstruct the classic liquidity rug, step by step
The whole crime is often a single transaction from a wallet that was identifiable from day one. Post-mortems nearly write themselves. The trick is checking BEFORE you buy.
A post-mortem finds the deployer kept an open mint function. Why was that the loaded gun?
Infinite supply on demand means every holder can be diluted to zero in one transaction. Mint rights are visible in the contract before you buy.
In a honeypot token, buys work but sells silently fail. Where does that trap live?
The contract simply refuses or taxes sells for anyone but the team. A chart full of buys and zero ordinary sells is the on-chain tell.
Squid Game token collapsed to near zero once the team ___. Holders had been code-blocked from selling all along.
The price chart went vertical, then to zero in minutes. The sell-block was in the public contract the whole time; few looked.
Which pre-buy checklist would have flagged most historic rug pulls?
Unlocked liquidity, open mint functions, and a few wallets holding most supply: the three loaded guns, all visible on-chain before a single euro is at risk. 🐜
The rest of this unit
Trace a trade, autopsy a rug pull, stress-test a claim. Detective work begins.