Reading liquidity locks and LP burns

The price is the pool

On an automated market, the price you see is a ratio of two piles of tokens in a pool. Uniswap v2 is the version easiest to explain, and a lot of new tokens still use that shape or a close copy. The pool holds both assets. A buyer adds one and removes the other. The constant-product rule, reserves of one asset times reserves of the other, is what moves the price. Nobody at the pool is promising to buy from you later. If the piles shrink, the market you were looking at shrinks with them.

The people who can shrink the piles are the ones who hold the liquidity tokens. In Uniswap v2 the pool contract itself is that token. You receive LP tokens when you add liquidity, and you redeem them to take your share of both reserves back. Sending those LP tokens, or calling the burn path while you hold them, is the withdrawal. A liquidity rug is that withdrawal, done by whoever still controls the LP, after outsiders have bought the risky side.

A sell that reverts is a different failure. The pool can be full and the contract can still refuse the sell. Read the honeypot guide for that case. This page is about whether the pool will still be there.

Arithmetic, not a pool we measured

These numbers are a sketch so the withdrawal is visible. They are not a quote from a live market and not a trade this site made. A pool holds 2 ETH and 2,000 tokens. The spot ratio is 1,000 tokens per ETH. One wallet holds every LP token. That wallet withdraws. Both reserves leave with the LP share. The chart that showed a price was describing the pool, and the pool is gone. Buyers hold the token. There is no ETH in this pool to sell it into.

Change one fact. The wallet burns half the LP tokens and keeps half. It can still withdraw about half the reserves. The pool looks locked in a badge that says 50 percent burned, and half the ETH can still walk away. Any quote of 'liquidity locked' that does not say what share, until when, and in which contract is leaving that half out.

Change another fact. The LP tokens are sent to a locker that will release them on a date three days away. Until that date the deployer cannot redeem. On that date they can. A lock is a delay. The delay is only as real as the locker contract. If the locker has an admin who can release early, or the lock is a token you can still transfer, the date on the badge is a caption.

A mint sits beside this and does not need the LP holder to rug in the classic way. The owner mints new tokens and sells them into the pool, taking out the ETH and leaving more of the token inside. The LP tokens never moved. The reserves changed because a trade did. That is why a burned LP position does not answer the mint question. The privileges guide is that half.

What a burn address stops

A burn, in the loose sense used on chart sites, means the LP tokens were sent to an address nobody should have a key for. The usual dead address is 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000dEaD. The zero address, forty zeros, is the other convention. ERC-20 transfers to the zero address often revert, so the dead address is the one you will actually see holding tokens. If the LP balance sits there, no ordinary wallet can sign a transfer of those LP tokens into a remove-liquidity call.

That stops one path: the holder of those particular LP tokens redeeming them. It does not stop a different pool that was never burned. A token can have a deep-looking primary pool with burned LP and a second pool the deployer controls. DexScreener lists pools it has indexed. The checker sums the USD liquidity those pairs report. One burned pool on a chart screenshot is not the sum.

It also does not stop a hostile pool contract. A normal Uniswap v2 pair burns by holding the LP. A pair that was not really Uniswap, or a router that points at a different pair, can display a burn and still let the deployer withdraw. Matching the pair address to the factory you think you are using is part of reading the page. A badge that says burned is a caption on top of that address.

GoPlus returns LP holders and a locked mark on some of them. If it lists holders and none are marked locked or burned, the checker warns that liquidity is not shown as locked. If it lists nobody, GoPlus has not covered the liquidity question. The row is not clear. Silence is not a lock.

What a lock is

A lock is a contract that holds the LP tokens and refuses to give them back until a timestamp, or until a condition you can read. Teams use locker contracts for this. The names you will see on badges include several commercial lockers. This guide does not rank them and has not reviewed their current admin keys. A lock is as good as its code and its expiry. Read the locker address on the explorer, the amount of LP it holds, and the unlock time. Then read whether that locker can be told to release early by its own owner.

Short locks are marketing. A lock that ends this weekend is a schedule for the withdrawal, not a reason the withdrawal cannot happen. Long locks reduce that particular risk and leave mint, tax, blacklist, and proxy upgrades untouched. A project can lock LP and keep a mint function. Buyers stare at the lock badge and never open the token contract.

Some locks vest, releasing a slice on a schedule. The unlocked slice can be withdrawn as it vests. The badge percent has to be read against the schedule, not as a permanent burn. If you cannot find the schedule in the locker contract, you do not have a lock. You have a picture of a lock.

How the checker talks about pools

DexScreener is the source for indexed liquidity and, when a pair has a creation time, for age. The checker adds up the USD liquidity figures on the pairs it is given. Under 1,000 dollars is critical: a pool that small can be moved by one trade. From 1,000 up to but not including 10,000 dollars is a warning. Those are thresholds in this site's code, not a claim about the right size of a market. A missing figure stays 'not reported' and does not become a zero that trips the critical band by itself.

No indexed pool is its own warning. The liquidity row says DexScreener has no pool for this address on the chain you picked. The age row is not filled in from that empty answer, and it is not marked clear. A brand new token that has not been indexed yet and a token with no market can look the same in that one source. Wait and recheck if you have a reason to think the pool is real. Do not buy on the argument that the warning is probably a delay.

Age is the oldest pair-created time in the response. Younger than two days is a warning. The checker says new pools are where rushed rugs show up, and that age alone is not a scam. A two-day-old pool with burned LP, no mint, and no tax can still be a rug tomorrow by a path these sources do not see. An old pool can still be upgraded if the token is a proxy. Age is a smell test. It is on the report so you do not skip it, not so you can stop reading.

The dollar figure is DexScreener's, summed by this site. It is not a bank balance we counted. Prices move, and an illiquid pool's dollar value is partly the last trade. Treat a round number on a thin pool as a rough size, then look at the reserves on the explorer if the size would change your decision.

A reading order

Paste the token address into the checker. Read the liquidity row and the age row before you read a lock badge in a Telegram screenshot. Then open the pair on the explorer. Confirm which wallet or contract holds the LP tokens. If it is a dead address, note the share of LP that is actually there. If it is a locker, open the locker and find the unlock time. If it is the deployer, there is no lock, whatever the chart caption says.

Then go back to the token contract for mint and owner. A perfect burn with a live mint is not a completed check. The rug pull page is the short version of that pairing. This page is the longer version of the pool half.

1. Get the pair address from the explorer or from DexScreener, not from a cropped screenshot.
2. See who holds the LP tokens. Deployer, locker, dead address, or a pile of unlabeled wallets.
3. If it is a locker, read the unlock time and whether the locker's admin can release early.
4. If it is the dead address, check the share. Burned means that share, not every pool.
5. Read mint, owner, and proxy on the token. A lock does not switch those off.
6. Compare with the checker. No indexed pool, thin liquidity, and unlocked LP are three different sentences.

• You know the share of LP that is burned or locked, not only that a badge exists.
• You know the unlock time, or you know there is no lock.
• You looked for a second pool the badge ignored.
• You did not treat a dollar figure under the checker's 10,000 dollar warning as deep.
• You did not treat a missing DexScreener pair as a clear liquidity row.
• You still checked mint and sell tax. The pool being intact does not make the token sellable.

Questions