The "eyewash" in the Crypto Assets World: Data Reveals Astonishing Scale

Recently, the price of Aura (AURA) tokens skyrocketed by 800% in just a few hours, rising from $0.001 to a peak of $0.008, with trading volume surging over 115,000% compared to the previous day. A well-known Crypto Assets analyst warned that this could be a carefully orchestrated eyewash. This type of crime, known as "Rug Pull," is sweeping through the entire Crypto Assets field on an industrial scale.

The Shocking Scale of Rug Pull Eyewash

After conducting on-chain analysis of the contracts of the four major public chains, it was found that approximately 304,000 tokens have experienced 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 a total of 266,000 independent addresses dedicated to the creation and promotion of fraudulent tokens.

These criminals use simple coin issuance tools and a large user base to precisely set up fraud traps. Although the average profit per eyewash project on Ethereum is about 1.65 million dollars, its huge user base results in total illegal gains reaching 502 billion dollars.

Data shows that there were 530 Rug Pull incidents on Polygon and 399 on Linea. Notably, the total profit from attacks on Polygon reached $10,140, involving 7,680 tokens in Rug Pulls, backed by 4,640 active fraudulent deployers. The emerging Linea chain, although with relatively smaller data volume, has recorded 4 contracts that were completely drained of liquidity.

Even more shocking is that a total of over 7.05 million investors have become direct victims of Rug Pull eyewash, meaning that the wealth of millions of individuals and families has vanished in these traps.

Types and Time Cycles of Rug Pull

hard Rug Pull: complete eyewash

Hard Rug Pull is a complete plunder, where scammers drain the entire liquidity of a project by pre-setting malicious code or vulnerabilities. For example, multiple addresses have carried out large-scale hard Rug Pulls on Avalanche and Polygon.

Some addresses have Rug Pull records on multiple blockchains, indicating that these scam groups are proficient in cross-chain operations, using the characteristics of different chains to commit crimes and evade tracking. This leads to token prices plummeting to zero, leaving investors with nothing.

Many scam addresses exhibit a very high crime frequency. For example, a certain address on Avalanche is associated with 45 Rug Pull coins and 37 drained liquidity pools. These addresses act like locusts, deploying coins in bulk, quickly draining them, and then disappearing or changing identities to start over.

The lifecycle of a large number of hard Rug Pull tokens is extremely short, as brief as 0 days, 1 day, or 3 days. This corroborates the eyewash models like "Pixiu Pan" — after the token goes live, the scam is completed in a short period, leaving investors no time window to react or exit.

Soft Rug Pull: Boiling Frogs in Warm Water

Compared to the violence of a hard Rug Pull, a soft Rug Pull is more covert and insidious. It usually refers to withdrawing about 50% of the liquidity, which does not cause the token price to plummet to zero instantly, but instead creates an illusion of a "slow decline" or "temporary adjustment by the project party." Scammers may fabricate various reasons, such as "migrating contracts," "upgrading systems," or "responding to market fluctuations."

Some investors may fail to escape in time due to a sense of luck or delayed reactions, ultimately suffering significant losses during the prolonged downward trend. Although this model may seem less lethal than a hard Rug Pull in a single instance, its concealment may have a broader impact and pose a more long-term, chronic erosion of market confidence.

The Deployment of Rug Pull Tokens Reaches New Heights in 2023

According to on-chain data from 2020 to 2025, the deployment of fraudulent tokens on Ethereum reached a historical peak of 125,759 in 2023, accounting for 42.3% of the total over five years. However, the deployment volume plummeted to 69,154 in 2024, a year-on-year decrease of 45%.

Fraud activities show a clear cyclical pattern, with an average annual deployment of 48,721 contracts across the four major chains during the period of 2021/2023. Notably, the average lifecycle of fraudulent contracts has sharply decreased from 356 days in 2021 to just 3.8 days in 2025, which necessitates that risk control models must have the capability to identify inter-chain coordinated attack patterns.

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 no longer just a series of individual investment losses, but a systematic attack on the trust foundation that the entire blockchain and Crypto Assets industry relies on.

Revealing the dark truth of Rug Pulls is not only to remind everyone to pay attention to risks but also to promote the establishment of a more comprehensive regulatory system in the entire industry. Investors should carefully examine key factors such as whether the contract is open source, whether it has been audited by a reputable auditing firm, the verifiability of the team's background, and the liquidity locking situation before participating in any project, in order to reduce the risk of encountering a Rug Pull.