What is a rug pull?

A rug pull is the moment a project's insiders take the money and leave. After building hype and attracting buyers, the team removes the liquidity backing the token, dumps a large pre-mined allocation, or flips a hidden switch that disables selling. Whatever the method, holders are left with a token that can no longer be sold for anything close to what they paid.

Rugs come in two broad shapes. A hard rug is outright theft baked into the contract — a backdoor mint, an owner-only withdraw, or a disabled transfer function. A soft rug is slower and harder to prosecute: the team simply abandons the project and sells into its own buyers over time. Both rely on the same thing, namely that most people never read the contract or check who controls the liquidity.

The defences are unglamorous but effective: confirm the liquidity is locked or burned, check whether ownership is renounced, and make sure you can actually sell. Sally is built around surfacing exactly these signals on Base and BNB Smart Chain — a honeypot simulation to prove the exit works, and transparent on-chain liquidity locks so you can verify the pool cannot simply be pulled out from under you.