Rug Pull

A rug pull is an exit scam in which a token's insiders drain its liquidity pool or dump their holdings, collapsing the price and leaving buyers holding a token they can no longer sell at meaningful value.

Rug pulls come in two broad forms. In a hard rug, the deployer removes the pooled liquidity directly, mints new supply through a hidden function, or ships honeypot code that lets people buy but never sell. In a soft rug, the mechanics look legitimate but the outcome is similar: the team quietly sells a large insider allocation into whatever liquidity exists, bleeding the price over days or weeks.

Several design choices reduce the attack surface. Locking or burning the LP position removes the deployer's ability to pull liquidity. Immutable contracts with no mint, pause, or blacklist functions remove the levers a malicious team would need. Fair launches with no large insider allocations shrink the supply that can be dumped, and verified source code lets anyone check for hidden traps. Tessera applies the second of these to its index products: index tokens sit in immutable vault contracts that no admin can alter. On the launch side, a Base launchpad that locks LP for years at launch is what removes the liquidity-pull lever before the first trade.

None of this makes a token safe in an absolute sense. A project with locked liquidity can still fail on its merits, and a team can still abandon it. Treat these protections as filters that remove the most common scams, not as a substitute for understanding what you are buying. Nothing here is financial advice.