SolRugDetector: Investigating Rug Pulls on Solana

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 25 Mar 2026] SolRugDetector: Investigating Rug Pulls on Solana Jiaxin Chen, Ziwei Li, Zigui Jiang, Ruihong He, Yantong Zhou, Jiajing Wu, Zibin Zheng Solana has experienced rapid growth due to its high performance and low transaction costs, but the extremely low barrier to token issuance has also led to widespread Rug Pulls. Unlike Ethereum-based Rug Pulls that rely on malicious smart contracts, the unified SPL Token program on Solana shifts fraudulent behaviors toward on-chain operations such as market manipulation. However, existing research has not yet conducted a systematic analysis of these specific Rug Pull patterns on Solana. In this paper, we present a comprehensive empirical study of Rug Pulls on Solana. Based on 68 real-world incident reports, we construct and release a manually labeled dataset containing 117 confirmed Rug Pull tokens and characterize the workflow of Rug Pulls on Solana. Building on this analysis, we propose SolRugDetector, a detection system that identifies fraudulent tokens solely using on-chain transaction and state data. Experimental results show that SolRugDetector outperforms existing tools on the labeled dataset. We further conduct a large-scale measurement on 100,063 tokens newly issued in the first half of 2025 and identify 76,469 Rug Pull tokens. After validating the in-the-wild detection results, we release this dataset and analyze the Rug Pull ecosystem on Solana. Our analysis reveals that Rug Pulls on Solana exhibit extremely short lifecycles, strong price-driven dynamics, severe economic losses, and highly organized group behaviors. These findings provide insights into the Solana Rug Pull landscape and support the development of effective on-chain defense mechanisms. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computers and Society (cs.CY) Cite as: arXiv:2603.24625 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2603.24625v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.24625 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Jiaxin Chen [view email] [v1] Wed, 25 Mar 2026 02:31:31 UTC (2,555 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.CY References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)