Autopsy of a rug: launch to zero

Time of death: about six hours after launch. Let's walk the body. Block zero: pool goes live, and in that same block a bundle of fifteen fresh wallets buys 40% of the tradable supply — insiders in position before a single human saw the ticker. Minutes one through thirty: the shill wave. Paid callers post the contract, engagement bots swarm, volume bots start cycling to make the chart look alive. Retail arrives, the candle goes vertical, and the screenshots write themselves. Everything about this launch was manufactured before you ever heard its name.

Hour one through four: the bleed. The bundle wallets start feeding supply into every green candle — never all at once, always into strength, exactly the distribution pattern from last lesson. Price makes lower highs while influencers call it "consolidating." Holder count still rises, which the community reads as growth; it's actually the bag being fractured into thousands of smaller hands. Then the kill. It comes in one of two flavors: the hard rug — LP was never locked, dev pulls the liquidity, and price doesn't crash so much as stop existing, because there's nothing left to sell into. Or the soft rug — liquidity is technically safe, mint may even be revoked, but the bundled 40% just keeps selling until the chart is a flatline at minus 99%. The soft version is legal-ish, slower, and takes the same amount of your money.

Hour six: socials deleted, website dark, and the deployer's funding wallet sends fresh gas to a brand-new address, because the next launch is in an hour. Now rewind the tape: every fatal wound was visible at birth. The bundle in block zero. The unlocked LP. The fresh-wallet cluster. The serial-deployer funding trail. Nobody needed to predict the future — they needed five minutes of looking at the present. That's the entire point of an autopsy: the cause of death was pre-existing, and the chart just published it.