How to read a PumpPill token scan, line by line

You asked how to check whether a crypto token is a rug. Here is the uncomfortable part: no scan can answer that question directly. A rug is an action a person takes, not a property a contract has. What a scan can do is show you the structure of a token at a moment in time and put that next to what has actually happened to tokens like it. This article walks the scan page from top to bottom and explains where each line comes from, and what it does not mean.

The verdict sentence

At the top of a scan is a single sentence that summarizes what the checks below it found. It is a compression, not a new measurement. Everything in that sentence is derived from the chips underneath it, which in turn are derived from on-chain data read at the moment you asked.

That matters because a summary sentence loses information. If the verdict reads clean but three chips below it are amber, the sentence is not wrong — it is just less specific than the evidence. The rule is simple: when the verdict and the chips disagree in tone, trust the chips.

The chips

Each chip is one check, labelled with what was checked and what was found. Common ones cover whether the deployer can still create new supply, whether they can freeze your ability to transfer, how much of the supply sits in the largest wallets, whether liquidity exists and how it is held, and how old the token is. Some chips are yes-or-no; others are bands, like a concentration percentage.

Two things to hold in mind. First, a chip is a fact about a timestamp, not a forecast. A contract with no dangerous permissions today can be changed tomorrow if the permissions still exist, and a lock that expires next week is a lock today. Second, chips describe the contract and its holders, not the people behind it. The most carefully built token in the world can still be abandoned by whoever launched it.

The call line: first-logged, peak, now

This is the line worth the most attention, and it is the one most people misread.

First-logged is the market cap of the token at the instant our system first recorded it. That figure is fixed. It never changes, because it describes a moment that has passed.

Peak is the highest market cap observed after that instant. It is measured only forward. It never looks backwards at what the token did before we logged it, because we were not there and cannot claim it.

Now is the current market cap.

The gap between first-logged and peak is the whole story, and it only means something as a ratio. A token that peaked at a hundred million dollars from an entry of five million dollars is a very different object from one that peaked at a hundred million from an entry of ninety million. Same peak, opposite experience. A peak on its own is a number without a denominator.

There is a third thing hiding in that line: tokens that went nowhere are still in it. We do not delete the calls that failed. That is why the aggregate figures below include flat and down outcomes rather than quietly dropping them.

##