The seven checks that matter before you buy a Solana meme coin, what each one actually predicts, and the base rates you are betting against.
Most tokens on Solana launchpads end at zero. Depending on the definition used, between 80 percent and 98.6 percent of pump.fun tokens are classified as rugs or abandoned, the median flagged rug lasts about 14 minutes, and 68.7 percent of tokens have their last trade on the day they launched. Checks do not make a token safe. They remove the most obviously doomed ones.
If mint authority still exists, the creator can print more supply. If freeze authority exists, they can stop you selling. Either is a hard no. On launchpad tokens both are usually revoked by the program itself, so a green tick here means very little for a pump.fun launch, and a red flag here on a non-launchpad token is decisive.
One wallet holding 30 percent or more can end the token in a single sell. Published guidance treats a single cluster under 15 percent as normal, 15 to 30 percent as elevated and over 30 percent as high risk. Be aware of what this does not tell you: in one academic dataset, top-ten holders averaged 77.9 percent of supply among tokens that returned more than 100 percent. Concentration marks the pump as reliably as it marks the rug.
More than half of pump.fun launches are bought in the same block they are created, by wallets the deployer funded. Of those snipes, 87 percent were profitable for the sniper, and 55 percent exited within one minute. If you are buying a minutes-old token, you are usually buying from those wallets. Bundle checkers exist for exactly this; treat over 15 percent of supply taken in the first block as serious.
Liquidity is what you sell into. Under about 5,000 dollars, a normal-sized exit moves the price against you enough to erase a good trade. Check that liquidity is real and not a number inflated by wash trading between a handful of addresses.
A token you can still buy an hour after launch has already survived something most do not. Look at the five-minute buy and sell counts: a wall of sells against a thin book is the exit in progress.
A creator who has launched and abandoned tokens before will do it again. A creator who bought none of their own token has no reason to care what happens to it. A creator who bought most of it is the risk in point two.
On a small position, a round trip costs roughly 8 to 25 percent once you count the protocol fee on both sides, terminal fees, priority fees, tips and price impact. The token has to move that far before you are even. No checklist changes that number.