Two serious reports, two figures on memecoin scams. The first says 98.6%. The second says 3.59%. And the funniest part is, neither one is lying.
The 98.6% figure comes from Solidus Labs, a market surveillance firm. In May 2025, it examined more than 7 million tokens created on Pump.fun, Solana’s memecoin machine, between January 2024 and March 2025. The result: only 97,000 still had more than $1,000 in liquidity. Everything else had collapsed.
The 3.59% figure comes from Chainalysis, a blockchain analytics firm. Of the 2,063,519 tokens launched in 2024, it identified 74,037 with a typical “pump and dump” pattern: someone adds liquidity, attracts buyers, then pulls out at least 65% of the funds and the pool dies.
So, are 98% scams or 4%? Neither, actually. They’re measuring different things.
Solidus counts all tokens that have died, regardless of the reason. A memecoin created as a joke one evening that nobody buys ends up in the same bucket as a genuine scam. Pump.fun also responded that most memecoins, like most tweets or NFTs, aren’t worth much in the long run—and that’s the whole point.
Chainalysis, on the other hand, counts only cases where you see money being pulled out of the pool after genuine interest (more than 100 transactions in the pool). Much stricter. And here’s a chilling detail: in about 94% of these cases, it was the address that created the pool that drained it.
What I take away from this: the danger isn’t just the scammer. It’s the mechanics.
On a price curve like Pump.fun’s, every purchase drives the price up for the next buyer. The first buyers get in for almost nothing; the last ones pay top dollar. You don’t need malicious intent to lose money: all it takes is arriving late, when the token is already “trending” in your feed. The people who drove it up there are often the ones selling.
A “rug pull” is when those who control the liquidity (the money that makes it possible to buy and sell the token) withdraw it. The price drops to almost zero, and even if you want to sell, there’s nobody on the other side.
A few questions I ask myself before touching a brand-new token, without claiming that this is enough:
Who holds the liquidity, and is it locked or can it be withdrawn at any time? An explorer like Solscan or BscScan will often show you.
How many wallets hold most of the supply? If three addresses own 60%, you’re playing on their turf.
Why am I hearing about this now? If it’s because the price has already gone up 20x, I’m probably someone’s exit liquidity.
Can I lose 100% of this amount without it affecting my month? If the answer is no, that’s the end of the discussion.
None of this means that $SOL or $BNB are scams: they’re the networks where these tokens are born because creating a token there costs just a few cents. The ease of creation is precisely what makes it impossible to sort them out with the naked eye.
My take: focus instead on the 98.6%. Not because it proves everything is fraudulent, but because it tells you the truth that matters for your wallet: almost all these tokens end up at zero, scam or not.
And you—have you ever watched a memecoin die in real time, or do you stay away from this casino?
Not financial advice. Sources: Solidus Labs (Solana rug pull report, May 2025), Chainalysis (market manipulation, 2025), Pump.fun’s response to CoinDesk.
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