How to check a Solana token before you buy
Most of what decides whether a Solana token can hurt you is written in public on the chain, and you can read it in under a minute. Here are the five things worth checking before you buy, what each one means, and which of them a good chart can hide.
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Start with the mint account, not the chart
Every Solana token has a mint account that records who still holds power over it. Two fields matter most. Mint authority decides whether anyone can still create new tokens, which can dilute every holder to nothing in a single transaction. Freeze authority decides whether anyone can lock your tokens inside your own wallet so they can never be sold. On a new token, both should normally be revoked. A rising chart says nothing about either, because both powers can sit unused until the day they are used.
Check for the newer Token-2022 powers
Tokens created with the newer Token-2022 program can carry extensions that older checkers ignore. A permanent delegate can move tokens out of any holder's wallet without their signature. A transfer fee takes a cut of every transfer, and the rate can be anything from a fraction of a percent to most of the trade. A transfer hook runs another program's code on every transfer. None of these is visible on a price chart, and all of them are read directly from the mint account.
Look at who can pull the liquidity
A rug pull is one party withdrawing the trading pool, which leaves holders with tokens nobody can buy. So the useful question is not what share of liquidity is locked, but whether a single wallet can remove most of it. Liquidity spread across many independent providers cannot be pulled by any one of them. Liquidity held by the deployer can be pulled the moment buyers arrive. Burned or verified locked liquidity cannot be withdrawn at all.
Check how concentrated the holders are
If ten wallets hold most of the supply, a small group can sell into everyone who buys after them, whatever the contract says. This reading is an upper bound, because the largest accounts can include pool vaults or exchanges, but a very high share still tells you supply is not distributed. Compare it with liquidity: a token whose top holders together own far more than the pool can absorb can collapse without anyone pulling anything.
Read volume against depth
Daily volume many times larger than the pool is a common sign of wash trading, where the same wallets trade back and forth to make a token look popular. It does not prove fraud on its own, so treat it as a reason to look harder rather than a verdict. And be honest with yourself about what a clean check means: it rules out the structural traps, not a price that falls because buyers stop arriving. In the collapses we have measured, holders selling off was far more common than a pool being pulled.
FAQ
Is a token safe if mint and freeze authority are revoked?
It removes two of the most common traps, and that is all. A token with both revoked can still have a permanent delegate or a heavy transfer fee if it was built on Token-2022, can still have liquidity one wallet can pull, and can still be concentrated in a handful of wallets. Revoked authorities are necessary, not sufficient.
Can I check a pump.fun token before it graduates?
Yes. A token still on the pump.fun bonding curve has its liquidity held by the curve itself, which can be read from the chain, and its mint account can be checked like any other. Our Rug Checker reads both, and says plainly when a measurement could not be taken rather than filling the gap with a guess.
Does a rug checker need my wallet?
No, and one that asks for a wallet connection, a signature or a seed phrase is a warning sign in itself. Everything above is public chain data, so checking a token needs nothing but its address. Veriql never asks for a key and cannot move funds.
What does a partial check mean?
It means at least one dimension could not be measured, for example because a data source did not answer. We cap the score and say which part is missing rather than presenting half a check as a whole one, and we never offer a trade link on a partial verdict.