The Shadows of the Crypto Assets World: The Rampant Eyewash of Rug Pulls and Warnings

In the Crypto Assets market, some investors have made huge returns by choosing the right projects, but many others have suffered significant losses due to fraud. Recently, the price of the Aura (AURA) token skyrocketed by 800% in just a few hours, rising from $0.001 to $0.008, with trading volume surging over 115,000% compared to the previous day. However, a seasoned Crypto Assets analyst warned that this could be a carefully orchestrated eyewash. This type of crime, known as "Rug Pull", is spreading in the Crypto Assets field on an industrial scale.

The Astonishing Scale of Rug Pulls

Through the analysis of smart contracts on major public chains, data shows that over 300,000 tokens have encountered varying degrees of Rug Pull, with hundreds of "trap coins" being deployed to the network on average every day. On the Ethereum network, there are 266,000 independent addresses specifically engaged in creating and promoting fraudulent tokens.

These criminals exploit convenient coin issuance tools and a massive user base to precisely set up eyewash. Although the average profit from a single scam project on Ethereum is about $1.65 million, its enormous total leads to cumulative illegal gains reaching an astonishing $502 billion.

Other public chains have not been spared either. A certain public chain recorded 530 Rug Pull incidents, with total profits reaching $10,140, involving 7,680 tokens and 4,640 active fraud deployers. Another emerging public chain, although with a smaller data scale, has had 4 contracts completely drained of liquidity.

The most shocking thing is that over 7.05 million investors have directly suffered from Rug Pull eyewash, which means that the wealth of millions of individuals and families has vanished into thin air in these traps.

Types and Characteristics of Rug Pull

Hard Rug Pull: Complete Plunder

Hard Rug Pull is an extremely malicious fraud behavior where scammers intentionally withdraw all liquidity from a project by pre-setting malicious code or vulnerabilities. For example, an address on a certain public chain is associated with 88 Rug coins and 6 drained liquidity pools, with a ratio as high as 1466.67%.

Some scam gangs have demonstrated the ability to commit crimes across chains, leaving traces of their crimes on multiple public chains, utilizing the characteristics of different chains to perpetrate fraud and evade tracking. This has led to the price of the victim's tokens plummeting to zero, causing significant losses for investors.

Many eyewash addresses exhibit a very high crime rate. For example, one address on a public chain is associated with 45 Rug Pull coins and 37 drained liquidity pools. These addresses are like locusts in the digital world, deploying coins in bulk, quickly extracting funds, and then disappearing or changing identities to commit crimes again.

The lifecycle of a large number of hard Rug Pull tokens is extremely short, with some even completing their scams on the day they are created. This "blitzkrieg" style eyewash gives investors no opportunity to react or exit.

Soft Rug Pull: A Hidden Trap

Compared to the violent means of a hard Rug Pull, a soft Rug Pull is more covert and insidious. It usually only siphons off about 50% of the liquidity, which does not cause the token price to instantly drop to zero, but instead creates an illusion of a "slow decline" or "temporary adjustments by the project team." Scammers may fabricate various reasons, such as "contract migration," "system upgrade," or "dealing with market volatility," leading some investors to fail to withdraw in time due to misplaced optimism or delayed reactions, ultimately suffering significant losses amid the ongoing price decline.

2023: The Peak Period of Rug Pulls

According to on-chain data analysis, 2023 became a historical peak for the deployment of fraud tokens on the Ethereum network, reaching 125,759, accounting for nearly 42.3% of the total over the past five years. However, the deployment in 2024 significantly decreased to 69,154, a year-on-year reduction of 45%. This cyclical fluctuation indicates that fraud activities show clear cyclical characteristics.

It is noteworthy that the average lifespan of scam contracts has sharply decreased from 356 days in 2021 to only 3.8 days in 2025. This trend requires risk control models to have the ability to identify cross-chain collaborative attack patterns.

Conclusion

Rug Pull has developed into a well-defined, tool-oriented, and procedural mature black industry chain. The cost of fraud is extremely low, while the potential "returns" are huge. Investors need to remain vigilant and understand the common tactics of Rug Pull, such as promises of high returns, anonymous teams, lack of audits, suspicious liquidity locking, excessive social media hype, and abnormal price surges in a short period.

Before making investment decisions, it is essential to carefully check key factors such as whether the contract is open-source, whether it has been audited by a reputable auditing agency, whether the team background is verifiable, and the situation of liquidity lock-up. Only through the joint efforts of the entire industry to establish a more comprehensive regulatory system can we effectively curb systemic risks that undermine the foundation of trust, protect the interests of investors, and promote the healthy development of the Crypto Assets industry.