The Rug Pull Left Solana: BNB, Base and TRON Token Factories

The rug pull outgrew Solana

Pump.fun turned the exit scam into a consumer product. Anyone with a Solana wallet and a meme could mint a token in seconds, watch a bonding curve price it, and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, watch it die within hours. A widely cited study by Solidus Labs, reported by CoinDesk, found that 98.6 percent of the tokens launched on Pump.fun ended as rug pulls or acts of fraud. The platform’s own token, PUMP, trades around $0.0047 with a market capitalization near $2.2 billion, according to CoinGecko, even as the factory beneath it keeps printing tokens that go to zero.

That story is familiar by now. What gets less attention is that the model did not stay on Solana. The bonding-curve launchpad, a machine that mints a token, prices it, and hands it liquidity with no human gatekeeper, has been copied onto every chain that wants retail flow. BNB Chain has Four.meme and a crowd of imitators. Base has Zora and Clanker. TRON has SunPump. Each is a token factory, and each produces the same long tail of worthless tokens that Pump.fun made notorious. The rug pull is no longer a Solana phenomenon; it is a multichain industry with regional franchises.

The scale away from Solana is not hypothetical. On BNB Chain alone, the analytics firm ChainAware says it counted more than 100,000 clear-cut rug events on a single decentralized exchange in the first 20 weeks of 2026, with the operators net-extracting over half a billion dollars. This piece follows the rug pull across those chains: how the launchpad turns fraud into a product, what the real numbers are, what changes when you cross from Solana to an EVM chain or to TRON, and why the law still struggles to name a defendant when the factory is spread across four networks at once.

How a launchpad turns a rug pull into a product

To see why rugs scale so easily across chains, it helps to understand what a launchpad actually does. A memecoin launchpad is an assembly line with three stations. First, creation: a user names a token, uploads an image, and deploys it, usually for a trivial fee or none at all. Second, price discovery: the token trades against a bonding curve, a formula that raises the price as more people buy, so there is a live market from the first second with no need to seed a pool by hand. Third, graduation: once the curve fills to a threshold, the launchpad migrates the token and its accumulated liquidity to a full automated market maker (PumpSwap on Solana, PancakeSwap on BNB Chain, Uniswap on Base, SunSwap on TRON), where it trades like any other pair.

Every step in that pipeline removes friction, and friction is the only thing that ever slowed a scammer down. You do not need to write or deploy a smart contract. You do not need to find early liquidity. You do not need a market maker. The launchpad supplies all of it as a service, which means the marginal cost of launching one more token that will rug is effectively zero. That is the quiet point behind the 98.6 percent figure: the number is high not because launchpad users are unusually dishonest, but because the machine makes launching a doomed token as cheap as posting a tweet.

It is worth being precise about terms, because not every token that goes to zero is a rug pull. A hard rug is theft wired into the token itself: the deployer pulls the liquidity pool, mints an unlimited new supply and dumps it, or codes the contract so buyers can never sell (a honeypot). A soft rug is abandonment: the team dumps its own allocation and walks away, leaving a technically functional but worthless token. A slow rug is the legal cousin: a pre-announced insider unlock that transfers value from latecomers to insiders on a published schedule, with nothing illegal in the code at all. Launchpads industrialize all three, and, crucially, the launchpad itself usually does not rug you. It is the factory floor, not the thief. That distinction matters enormously once the lawyers arrive, as the later sections show.

The number that is not $2.8 billion

Before going chain by chain, clear away the statistic that pollutes almost every article on this subject. You will read, in countless places, that rug pulls cost investors $2.8 billion in 2025, usually attributed to Chainalysis. That figure does not exist in any primary Chainalysis source. The firm’s 2026 crypto-crime analysis counts roughly $17 billion in scam and fraud inflows for 2025, with the average individual scam payment rising to about $2,764, but it does not publish a rug-pull-specific dollar line, because it measures funds that actually move to illicit addresses, not market capitalization that evaporates on paper (see Chainalysis).

The $2.8 billion almost certainly began life as a different number: the same Solidus Labs study reported by CoinDesk put the median rug value at about $2,800. In other words, the typical rug is tiny, thousands of dollars, not millions. The headline damage comes from two places: the sheer volume of small scams, and a handful of mega-rugs that skew the total. Confusing a $2,800 median with a $2.8 billion aggregate is how a sober data point becomes clickbait, and the confusion matters because it shapes how people picture the threat. The danger is not one giant heist; it is a firehose of small ones, most of which never make the news and never get investigated.

Here is how a few of the most repeated claims hold up against what the sources actually say.

BNB Chain: Four.meme and the PancakeSwap funnel

BNB Chain was the first serious copy of the Solana model, and it remains the largest. Four.meme, live since early 2024, is the longest-running BNB Chain memecoin launchpad and the template the others follow: connect a wallet, launch a token with no whitelist and no exchange account, trade it on a bonding curve, and graduate to PancakeSwap once the curve fills, with the launchpad burning the liquidity-pool tokens on the way out to make the classic liquidity pull harder. Its trading fee sits around 1 percent, per Coin Bureau. Rivals such as Flap and a rotating cast of imitators compete on exactly the same ground.

Burning the liquidity pool is supposed to protect buyers, and it does neutralize one specific attack. It does nothing for the others. That is the uncomfortable lesson in the numbers published by ChainAware, which runs an automated rug-pull detector across eight chains. In the first 20 weeks of 2026, on PancakeSwap V2 alone, the firm says it identified 103,695 rug events using the narrowest possible definition: a token creator who adds liquidity to a pool and then removes more than they put in. Those operators added about $1.38 billion in liquidity and pulled out about $1.95 billion, a net extraction of $569,388,384, according to ChainAware. The firm, whose figures are a vendor’s own measurements and should be read as such, says its detector flags roughly nine in ten of these events, often within the first hour of a pool’s life, before any social signal exists.

Sit with that number. More than half a billion dollars, net, from the crudest category of rug, on one decentralized exchange, on one chain, in under five months. And that definition deliberately excludes honeypots, insider dumps, hidden mints, and every rug subtler than add-then-yank. The BNB Chain rug economy is not a sideshow to Solana’s; it is comparable in scale, and arguably easier to overlook precisely because it does not carry a single headline brand like Pump.fun. Four.meme is only the front door. PancakeSwap V2 is where the money actually changes hands, and where it actually disappears.

Base: when the chain’s own megaphone became the pump

Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2, took the launchpad in a different and in some ways stranger direction. Here the factory is wired into a social network. Zora is a platform on Base where posts are automatically minted as tradable tokens, so content and speculation become the same action. In April 2025 that design produced one of the most instructive episodes in the whole multichain story. Base’s own account posted the phrase that became a token, and the token, called “Base is for everyone,” pumped to roughly a $17 million market capitalization before collapsing more than 90 percent within minutes. Blockchain analysts found that three wallets had bought in just before the public posts and walked away with around $666,000, and that the top three wallets briefly controlled about 47 percent of the supply, as Forbes documented. Base said the token was never official, described it as a cultural and artistic post rather than a product, and said it did not sell its own holdings.

Whatever the intent, the episode showed how thin the wall is between a chain promoting itself and a chain running a pump. When the act of posting is the act of minting, an official megaphone becomes a buy signal that insiders can front-run. No liquidity was pulled, no contract was malicious, and yet latecomers lost almost everything to people who were earlier and better positioned. That is the soft rug in its native habitat, and Base’s consumer-first design makes it unusually easy to stage.

The other Base engine is Clanker, an AI-agent launchpad where a token is deployed by tagging a bot on the Farcaster social network. There is no creation fee; the bot drops the full supply into a Uniswap pool, the creator sets a pool fee, and Clanker keeps a cut of the trading fees. Farcaster acquired Clanker in October 2025, a deal that sent the CLANKER token up more than 350 percent and redirected two-thirds of protocol fees into buying and holding the token, as The Defiant reported. By early 2026, Clanker-deployed tokens had generated billions of dollars in cumulative trading volume, and the protocol ranked among the top fee earners on Base. As on every other launchpad, the overwhelming majority of those tokens are worthless within days; the fees are real, the tokens mostly are not.

TRON: the quiet factory

TRON shows what happens when the model travels but the crowd does not follow. SunPump launched in August 2024 as the first memecoin launchpad built for TRON, part of the broader SUN.io ecosystem, and it works exactly like the others: a fair-launch bonding curve that graduates completed tokens into SunSwap, TRON’s automated market maker, with the liquidity pool burned on migration. For a few weeks in the late summer of 2024 it was a genuine rival to Pump.fun, setting single-day records for launches and revenue, as Cryptonomist reported at the time.

The momentum did not last. By 2026 SunPump’s activity is a fraction of its 2024 peak, and TRON never developed the memecoin culture that keeps the Solana and Base launchpads busy. That is instructive in its own right. The launchpad software is trivial to port; what is hard to port is attention. TRON is one of the most heavily used chains on earth for stablecoin settlement, especially in emerging markets, yet cheap transactions and deep USDT liquidity were not enough to make it a memecoin hub. The rug pull follows narrative and crowd, not just low fees. Where the attention goes, the factory follows, and where the factory follows, so does the fraud. TRON is the control group that proves the point: identical mechanics, far less traffic, and correspondingly fewer rugs, not because TRON is safer by design but because fewer people showed up to be rugged.

The cross-chain launchpad map

The launchpads differ in detail but rhyme in structure. The table below, drawn from Coin Bureau’s survey of the major venues, lays the main ones side by side. Note how similar the mechanics are, and how the only consistent revenue model is a cut of trading fees, which is why launchpads make money whether a token survives or rugs.

Why the rug pull went multichain

If the mechanics are the same everywhere, why bother spreading? Because the spread itself is an advantage. Several forces push the rug across chains at once.

The first is simple economics. Launching costs almost nothing on any of these chains, so an operator can run the same playbook on Solana, BNB Chain, and Base in parallel and let the market decide which coin catches. More shots, same near-zero cost, higher expected payout. The second is attention. Liquidity chases narratives, and narratives rotate: a hot Solana cycle, a Base consumer-app push, an AI-agent mania. The scammer follows the heat, because the pool of buyers is wherever the current story lives.

The third force is fragmentation, and it works in the fraudster’s favor. Detection tools, on-chain investigators, and law-enforcement attention are uneven across chains. A tool that is excellent on Solana may be blind on TRON; an investigator fluent in EVM traces may not read Solana program logs as quickly. Spreading activity across networks dilutes scrutiny and slows everyone trying to catch you. The fourth is reputational cover. Base borrows credibility from Coinbase, and BNB Chain from the largest exchange ecosystem in the world, each lending a veneer of legitimacy that a brand-new Solana memecoin cannot claim on its own.

Finally, the exit is multichain too. Once a rug is complete, bridges let the proceeds move to whichever chain offers the best mixing and off-ramp options, which is a large part of why cross-chain bridges remain such a sensitive chokepoint. The rug does not merely launch on many chains; it launders across them. Put those forces together and the multichain spread stops looking like coincidence. It is the exit scam optimizing for the places with the most buyers and the least friction, the way water finds the cracks.

What changes, and what doesn’t, when you cross the chain

A rug on Base does not look identical to a rug on Solana under the hood, because the two chains model tokens differently, and the differences decide which red flags matter. On Solana, a token carries two powerful switches as native properties. Mint authority, if the deployer keeps it, lets them create new supply at will and dilute every holder toward nothing. Freeze authority, if set, lets them freeze your tokens in place, a honeypot by another name. The first questions a Solana trader should ask are whether mint authority is renounced, whether freeze authority is disabled, and whether the liquidity is locked or burned. This is precisely what Solana-native scanners like RugCheck are built to read.

On EVM chains, which include BNB Chain, Base, Arbitrum, and Ethereum, a token is an ordinary smart contract, and the danger lives in what that contract’s owner is allowed to do. Can the owner mint fresh supply? Blacklist a wallet so it cannot sell? Raise the transfer tax to 100 percent? Is the contract an upgradeable proxy, meaning the clean code you read today can be swapped for malicious code tomorrow? Does the sell function actually work, or is it a honeypot that only lets you buy? These are different questions from the Solana ones, and they call for different tools, which is why EVM-focused scanners like GoPlus, Token Sniffer, and Honeypot.is dominate on those networks.

Some tells are universal. Across every chain, you want liquidity that is genuinely locked or burned, a deployer wallet without a history of prior rugs, and a supply that is not concentrated in a handful of addresses that can dump on you at will. One blind spot is universal too: the slow rug. A pre-announced insider unlock, where a large tranche of tokens vests to the team and early investors on a published schedule, is legal, visible, and completely invisible to every scanner, because there is nothing malicious in the code. It is a scheduled transfer of value from latecomers to insiders, and no detector flags it. Remember, too, that buying any of these tokens means signing approvals, and a malicious contract can disguise a wallet drain as a routine approval, so what you confirm on your hardware wallet matters as much as any scanner’s verdict. The table below sorts the signals by where they apply.

The audit that wasn’t a shield

Traders reach for a single reassurance more than any other: the audit. A logo from a known security firm feels like a guarantee. It is not, and the clearest proof is multichain. In May 2023, the Arbitrum DeFi project Swaprum pulled roughly $3 million from around 22,000 wallets, using an upgradeability feature in its contracts to drain user deposits, after it had been audited by CertiK. The audit had even flagged the centralization risk in the upgrade mechanism; it simply was not treated as a reason to fail the project, as DL News reported.

Hugh Brooks, CertiK’s director of security operations, put the limitation plainly: “an audit is not a stamp of approval or a ‘pass’ or fail, it’s an objective review of a project’s code.” That is the honest version of what an audit is, and it is worth internalizing. An audit reads the code at a moment in time. It cannot see the deployer’s intent, it cannot stop an upgradeable contract from being changed later, and on a launchpad it is usually absent entirely, because the tokens are generated automatically with no project behind them to review.

Worse, the audit itself is now a counterfeited product. Across chains, fraudulent projects paste fake audit badges onto their sites, claim reviews from firms that never touched the code, or link to a genuine audit of a completely different contract. The credibility an audit is supposed to confer has itself become a thing to fake. And it is important to be clear about what an audit, even a real one, is for. Audits and bug-bounty programs exist to catch honest mistakes in code that is trying to be correct. A rug pull is not a mistake. It is the code working exactly as the deployer intended. No amount of review catches a thief who wrote the lock to open for themselves.

Detection across eight chains

If no audit saves you, what does? A realistic answer is a toolkit matched to the chain, used with low expectations. No single scanner covers everything, and anyone who promises otherwise is selling something. RugCheck is the standard first look on Solana, reading mint and freeze authority and clustering insider wallets. On EVM chains, GoPlus scores contracts for honeypots, hidden owners, and active mint functions across dozens of networks, Token Sniffer matches bytecode against known scam templates, and Honeypot.is simulates a buy and a sell so you can see whether selling is even possible. De.Fi runs a multichain scanner against a database of known-malicious contracts. ChainAware, the firm behind the PancakeSwap figures above, runs a predictive detector across eight chains that scores both the deployer’s behavioral history and the contract code.

The frontier is predictive, and it is genuinely useful: a model that flags a likely rug within the first hour, before any social proof exists, buys a trader real protection. But read the vendor numbers critically. ChainAware claims its latest detector catches around nine in ten of the crudest rugs, which means roughly one in ten slips through, typically the sophisticated operators with clean deployer wallets and obfuscated code. And the academic literature on rug detection keeps running into the same methodological trap: models that look accurate because they were accidentally trained on data from after the rug happened, a form of time travel that collapses the moment the model faces a live, unlabeled token. Treat a green light as no obvious trap found, not as safe.

Two layers sit beyond the scanners. The first is human: independent on-chain investigators who trace wallet clusters and name operators, and community reporting that surfaces a scam faster than any automated feed. The second is your own signing discipline. Even a clean token is bought by signing a transaction, and the most common way wallets are drained on every chain is a malicious approval dressed up as a routine confirmation. Reviewing exactly what you are signing, ideally on an air-gapped hardware wallet that forces you to confirm the details on a separate screen, is the last line of defense, and it works the same on Solana, BNB Chain, Base, and TRON alike. None of these layers, not the scanners, not the investigators, not your own care, will flag a legal insider unlock. The slow rug remains the hole in every net.

Who is liable when the rug is on BNB or Base?

Spreading the factory across chains is not just a commercial strategy; it is a legal one. To see why, start with where US law landed in 2026. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s staff said in February 2025 that most memecoins are not securities, closer to collectibles than to investment contracts. Commissioner Hester Peirce framed the gap bluntly, telling reporters that “many of the memecoins that are out there probably do not have a home in the SEC under our current set of regulations,” as The Block reported. Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw dissented, warning that the staff position read, at best, like “a roadmap for crypto enterprises looking to evade oversight by labeling themselves as a meme coin,” in a statement published by the SEC.

A federal court then put that theory to the test. In the long-running class action against Pump.fun’s operator, a judge in the Southern District of New York dismissed the securities claims with prejudice in late August 2026, reasoning that a memecoin bonding curve is not a common enterprise under the Howey test, and cleared Solana Labs and the Solana Foundation entirely, finding no proof that the infrastructure knew it was facilitating fraud. The chain walked. What survived were racketeering claims against the operator and its founders, built on two very different theories: wire fraud, grounded in specific public statements calling the platform an unruggable fair launch, and unlicensed money transmission under a federal statute, as CryptoTimes summarized the ruling.

Translate that to a multichain world and the problem sharpens. If securities law does not reach memecoins, and the chain and its infrastructure are not liable, enforcement is left chasing two things: operators who told specific, provable lies, and the unlicensed movement of money. Both are powerful, and the money-transmission theory in particular could in principle reach any protocol that takes a fee to move value. But both require a named, reachable human. When the launchpad operator is pseudonymous, the promoters are scattered across Telegram, and the activity is split deliberately between an offshore BNB Chain project, a Base token, and a TRON clone, naming that human is exactly the problem. The SEC is a US regulator; BNB Chain and TRON sit in offshore ecosystems; Base is run by a US company, which raises its own distinct questions. The multichain rug is, among other things, a forum-shopping exercise, and the law has not caught up to a fraud that can relocate between networks in an afternoon.

Can the launchpad model be made rug-resistant?

Some rugs can be engineered out, and the better launchpads have started. Burning the liquidity pool on graduation, as Four.meme and SunPump do, kills the classic pull. Renouncing mint authority on Solana, or removing owner privileges on an EVM contract, closes the dilution and blacklist doors. Vesting locks slow insider dumps, and deployer-reputation scoring can flag a wallet that has rugged before. Each of these is real progress against a specific attack.

The trouble is that every defense closes exactly one door. Burning the pool does nothing about a honeypot, a hidden mint, or a team that simply dumps its bag; the half-billion-dollar PancakeSwap figure accrued on a chain whose flagship launchpad burns liquidity. Reputation scoring is defeated by a fresh wallet. And the slow rug cannot be engineered out at all, because an insider unlock is not a flaw in the code; it is a feature of the tokenomics, disclosed in advance and perfectly legal.

Underneath the technical cat-and-mouse sits an incentive problem that no contract fixes. A launchpad earns its fee whether a token thrives or dies within the hour, which means it has little financial reason to be strict about what launches. The clearest evidence is that the busiest launchpads post record revenue in the same quarters that the vast majority of their tokens go to zero. The friction that would genuinely deter scammers, identity checks, vetting, waiting periods, is the very friction these platforms stripped out in order to grow. Safety and the business model are in direct tension. You can make the crudest rugs harder and the predictable ones visible, but a permissionless, zero-cost token mint cannot be made safe without ceasing to be what it is.

If you trade tokens on any of these chains

None of this means the tokens are untouchable, only that the burden of safety sits entirely with you. If you are going to trade freshly launched tokens on Solana, BNB Chain, Base, or TRON, a short, chain-aware routine filters out most of the obvious traps in a couple of minutes.

• Run the token through a scanner built for its chain: RugCheck on Solana, GoPlus or Token Sniffer on an EVM chain, and a honeypot simulator before you buy anything.
• On Solana, confirm that mint authority is renounced and freeze authority is disabled. On an EVM chain, check whether the contract owner can mint, blacklist, or change fees, and whether the contract is an upgradeable proxy.
• Verify that liquidity is locked or burned, and check how concentrated the supply is; a few wallets holding most of the float is a standing threat.
• Read the token’s unlock schedule. A clean contract with a large insider tranche vesting next month is a slow rug waiting to happen, and no scanner will warn you.
• Distrust audit badges and endorsements, including a chain’s own promotion. Verify an audit at the source, and remember that an official account posting about a token is not a safety signal.
• Review every transaction you sign on a hardware wallet, and never grant an unlimited token approval to a contract you have not checked.
• Size the position as money you are prepared to lose in full, because on these venues the base rate is that the token goes to zero.

Two minutes of this will not catch a sophisticated operator with a clean wallet and obfuscated code, and it will never catch a legal insider unlock. But it filters out the crude majority, and since the crude majority is where most of the money is actually lost, that is most of the protection available to a retail trader on a permissionless chain.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a DeFi rug pull?

A rug pull is a scam in which a token’s creators take investors’ money and abandon the project. In a hard rug, the theft is coded into the token itself, by pulling the liquidity pool, minting unlimited new supply, or blocking holders from selling. In a soft rug, the team simply dumps its own tokens and walks away. Most now originate on memecoin launchpads, which let anyone mint and list a token in seconds.

Which blockchains have the most rug pulls?

Solana’s Pump.fun is the best-known source, but the rug pull is now multichain. BNB Chain rivals Solana in scale through launchpads like Four.meme that feed into PancakeSwap, while Base runs the model through Zora and Clanker, and TRON through SunPump. The mechanics are nearly identical on each chain; only the token model and the tooling differ.

How do I check whether a token is a rug pull before buying?

Use a scanner built for the token’s chain, such as RugCheck on Solana or GoPlus and Token Sniffer on EVM chains like BNB Chain and Base, and run a honeypot simulation to confirm you can actually sell. Check that liquidity is locked or burned, that mint and owner privileges are renounced, and how concentrated the supply is. No tool can flag a legal, pre-announced insider unlock, so always read the token’s vesting schedule yourself.

Does a security audit mean a token is safe?

No. An audit reviews code at a single point in time and cannot see the deployer’s intent. The DeFi project Swaprum was audited by CertiK and still rugged its users. Audit badges are also frequently faked. An audit is designed to catch honest mistakes, but a rug pull is intentional, so a clean audit is not protection against a dishonest team.

Can you get your money back after a rug pull?

Rarely, and almost never in full. If the stolen funds pass through a centralized stablecoin issuer or exchange, they can sometimes be frozen, but most rug proceeds are laundered through mixers and bridges within hours. Report the theft to law enforcement, and be especially wary of recovery services that demand an upfront fee, because those are usually a second scam targeting victims.

By Anneke de Vries, senior security correspondent at HOGE Wire.