In the first wave of Solana memecoins during 2021, rugs were so common that they were considered a normal cost of playing the game. Dozens of tokens launched daily on then-primitive DEXs, and most of them were designed to dump. The community developed its own folklore around certain infamous rugs: ANUBIS, CATO, various anime girl tokens, and countless two-letter ticker scams that lived for hours before the liquidity disappeared.
What made the early Solana rug era distinctive was the speed. On Ethereum, pulling a rug required paying significant gas fees to deploy contracts and drain liquidity — there was friction. On Solana, transactions cost fractions of a cent, so bad actors could spin up ten new rugs a day with almost no overhead. The velocity of scams was orders of magnitude higher than any chain before it.
The community response evolved in waves. First came informal Telegram channels where traders warned each other. Then came dedicated alpha groups that did quick contract checks before promoting tokens. Then came the rise of Rugcheck, the Solana-specific equivalent of RugDoc, which built automated scanners for locked liquidity, mint authority, and other common scam patterns. By 2024, tools like Bubblemaps could visualize wallet-concentration in seconds, making obvious scams much easier to detect.
The broader lesson of the early Solana rug era is that every new chain with low fees will experience a scam flood, and the community has to develop its own antibodies. Ethereum went through it in 2017 with ICOs. BSC went through it in 2021. Solana went through it in 2021-2022 and again during the 2024 memecoin peak. Each iteration taught traders better defensive habits, and each new cycle finds new ways to fool them anyway. The arms race never ends.
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