SolRugDetector: Investigating Rug Pulls on Solana

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive empirical analysis of Rug Pulls on Solana, introduces SolRugDetector for on-chain fraud detection, and provides large-scale insights into the Rug Pull ecosystem on Solana.

Contribution

It offers the first systematic analysis of Solana-specific Rug Pull patterns, a new detection system, and large-scale measurement results.

Findings

76,469 Rug Pull tokens identified in recent issuance

Rug Pulls have short lifecycles and are highly organized

Significant economic losses associated with Rug Pulls

Abstract

Solana has experienced rapid growth due to its high performance and low transaction costs, but the extremely low barrier to token issuance has also led to widespread Rug Pulls. Unlike Ethereum-based Rug Pulls that rely on malicious smart contracts, the unified SPL Token program on Solana shifts fraudulent behaviors toward on-chain operations such as market manipulation. However, existing research has not yet conducted a systematic analysis of these specific Rug Pull patterns on Solana. In this paper, we present a comprehensive empirical study of Rug Pulls on Solana. Based on 68 real-world incident reports, we construct and release a manually labeled dataset containing 117 confirmed Rug Pull tokens and characterize the workflow of Rug Pulls on Solana. Building on this analysis, we propose SolRugDetector, a detection system that identifies fraudulent tokens solely using on-chain transaction and state data. Experimental results show that SolRugDetector outperforms existing tools on the labeled dataset. We further conduct a large-scale measurement on 100,063 tokens newly issued in the first half of 2025 and identify 76,469 Rug Pull tokens. After validating the in-the-wild detection results, we release this dataset and analyze the Rug Pull ecosystem on Solana. Our analysis reveals that Rug Pulls on Solana exhibit extremely short lifecycles, strong price-driven dynamics, severe economic losses, and highly organized group behaviors. These findings provide insights into the Solana Rug Pull landscape and support the development of effective on-chain defense mechanisms.