Rug Pull eyewash sweeps the Crypto Assets world, millions of investors suffer

In the Crypto Assets market, the price surges of some projects have made investors overnight millionaires, but many have also suffered heavy losses due to malicious operations by project teams. Recently, the price of the Aura coin skyrocketed by 800% within just a few hours, with trading volume surging over 115,000% compared to the previous day. However, analysts warn that this could be a meticulously planned eyewash — a type of fraud known as "Rug Pull" is spreading throughout the entire encryption field in an industrialized manner.

Rug Pull projects average profit of 1.65 million USD

According to on-chain analysis from a certain data platform, up to 304,000 tokens exhibit varying degrees of Rug Pull behavior, which means that hundreds of "trap coins" are deployed on the network every day. On Ethereum, there are 266,000 independent addresses active in creating and promoting fraudulent tokens. These "developers" use convenient token issuance tools and a large user base to precisely set their bait. Although the average profit from a single scam project on Ethereum is about 1.65 million dollars, the overall scale has reached an astonishing 502 billion dollars.

Data shows that there were 530 Rug Pull incidents on the Polygon chain and 399 on the Linea chain. Notably, the total profit from attacks on Polygon reached $10,140, involving 7,680 tokens in Rug Pull and 4,640 active fraudulent deployers. Although the emerging Linea chain has a smaller data volume, 4 contracts have already been completely drained of liquidity.

A total of over 7.05 million investors have become direct victims of Rug Pull eyecandy, which means that the wealth of millions of individuals and families has vanished into thin air in these traps.

Types and Time Cycles of Rug Pulls

a complete eyewash of a hard Rug Pull

Hard Rug Pull is a complete looting behavior, where scammers subjectively plunder the entire liquidity of a project by pre-setting malicious code or vulnerabilities. Some addresses have hard Rug Pull records on multiple blockchains, indicating that the scam group is proficient in cross-chain operations, committing crimes by leveraging the characteristics of different chains and evading tracking.

Many eyewash addresses exhibit extremely high crime rates. For example, one address on a certain blockchain is associated with 45 Rug Pull coins and 37 drained liquidity pools. These addresses are like locusts, deploying coins in bulk, draining quickly, and then disappearing or changing identities to start over.

The lifecycle of a large number of hard Rug Pull tokens is extremely short, as little as 0 days, 1 day, or 3 days. This confirms the scam models such as "Pixiu Plate"—tokens complete their fraud shortly after being launched, providing investors with no time window for response or exit.

Soft Rug Pull of Boiling Frog

Compared to the violent nature of a hard Rug Pull, a soft Rug Pull is more subtle and insidious. It does not cause the token price to plummet to zero instantly, but rather creates an illusion of a "slow decline" or "temporary adjustment by the project team." Scammers may concoct various reasons, and some investors may fail to escape in time due to wishful thinking or delayed reactions, ultimately suffering significant losses in the ongoing downtrend.

The deployment of Rug Pull tokens reached a peak in 2023

Based on on-chain data from 2020 to 2025, it can be observed that the deployment of fraudulent tokens on Ethereum reached a historical peak of 125,759 in 2023, accounting for 42.3% of the total amount over five years. However, the deployment volume plummeted to 69,154 in 2024, a year-on-year decrease of 45%. There is a clear cyclicality in fraudulent activities, with an average annual deployment volume of 48,721 across the four major chains during the 2021/2023 period. The average lifespan of fraudulent contracts has been compressed from 356 days in 2021 to 3.8 days in 2025, which poses higher requirements for risk control models.

The hundreds of thousands of fraudulent tokens and deployers indicate that Rug Pull has become a mature black industrial chain with clear division of labor, tool-based, and proceduralized. The cost of fraud is extremely low, while the potential "returns" are enormous. Investors need to understand the common tactics of Rug Pulls, such as promises of high returns, anonymous teams, lack of audits, suspicious or missing liquidity locks, social media hype, and rapid price manipulation. Before investing, it should be a necessary step to check whether the contract is open-source, whether it has been audited by well-known auditing firms, whether the team's background can be verified, and the status of liquidity locks.

Conclusion

The data on Rug Pulls is shocking: hundreds of thousands of fraudulent tokens, hundreds of thousands of scam deployers, trillions of dollars in illegal gains, and over seven million victims. This is not just a case of cumulative investment losses, but a systematic attack on the trust foundation that the entire blockchain and Crypto Assets industry relies on for survival. Uncovering the dark truth of Rug Pulls is not only to alert everyone to the risks but also to promote the establishment of a more complete regulatory system for the entire industry.