Rug Pull Red Flags: Five Checks To Run Before You Vote

The five rug pull red flags worth running on any vote game are unlocked liquidity, open token approvals, a contract owner who can mint or pause, unclear custody of the prize pool, and code nobody outside the team can read. Run them in that order and you learn the only thing that matters: whether somebody can walk off with the money while you sleep. Below I run all five on Temptation Token's own rounds and trophy distribution, give you the addresses to check, and name the three places where you still have to trust us.

What Is a Rug Pull, and Why Is Each One Costing More in 2026?

A rug pull is when the people behind a token take the money out and leave everyone else holding something worthless. The 2026 pattern is fewer incidents and a bigger average loss per incident, which is why the fear has grown even as the headlines thinned out.

The scale is old news and still ugly. Solidus Labs counted more than 300,000 scam tokens created and two million investors defrauded, more than FTX, Celsius and Voyager harmed combined. What changed is the shape. CoinLaw’s tracking shows rug pull incidents fell 66% in early 2025, with 7 major incidents against 21 in the same period of 2024, while the average amount stolen per rug pull climbed from about $410,000 in 2023 to about $510,000 in 2025. Fewer knives, deeper cuts. Chainalysis put a record $17 billion stolen in crypto scams and fraud in 2025.

Here is the real problem. Most writing about scams tells you to check the vote, the chart or the community, and that is a different question from the one that empties a wallet. We already covered whether a vote can be rigged in Provably Fair Voting. This post asks the colder question: can anybody walk off with the pool between rounds?

What Are the Five Rug Pull Red Flags to Run on Any Vote Game?

Five, and each one is a question about who holds the keys, not about how a project talks. Run them in order and most bad tokens fail before you reach the end.

• Liquidity. Who holds the LP tokens, and can they pull the pool today?
• Token approvals. What have you already given permission to spend, and for how much?
• Contract ownership. Who can mint, pause, upgrade or redirect funds?
• Pool custody. Where does the prize money sit between rounds, and whose signature moves it?
• Readable code. Is the source verified on the chain’s explorer, or are you trusting a screenshot?

Liquidity comes first because it is where the money physically lives. On a Uniswap v2 pool, ownership of the deposited pair is represented by LP tokens, and removing liquidity withdraws all tokens and any earned fees from the position. So the only honest question is who holds those LP tokens. A promise is not a lock: CoinLaw found liquidity locking promises were broken in 45% of rug-pull cases over the preceding twelve months, and anonymous developers were behind 92% of successful rug pulls in 2025.

The short version: read the holders, read the owner, read the code. If a project asks you to take any of those three on faith, that is your answer.

How Do Token Approvals Empty a Wallet, and How Do You Revoke Them?

An approval is standing permission for a contract to move a token out of your wallet, and it survives long after you close the tab. Disconnecting a site does not remove it. You revoke it on-chain, yourself, in about a minute.

The habit that matters is checking the allowance amount, not just the name of the app, because approvals are often requested for far more than the transaction in front of you. The Revoke.cash guide walks through finding an approval and clicking Revoke, and MetaMask’s support documentation lists the same route through the approval checker section of the block explorer for the network you are using.

Do this before you connect anywhere, not after. If you would rather keep play money away from everything else you own, that is the whole argument in Play Wallet on Base, and the setup steps are in Connect Wallet to Base.

Who Can Walk Off With the Prize Pool Between Rounds?

Nobody, because the pool does not sit anywhere between rounds. The voting contract pays every share in $TTS straight to the recipients’ wallets in the settlement transaction, and whatever is left over is burned in the same breath.

Here is how it works. Each round runs a week and closes Sunday night, US Eastern time; on-chain, every round ends Monday at 04:59:00 UTC. Players vote by sending $TTS to the voting contract on a profile, and the minimum vote is 5 $TTS. When the round closes, Chainlink VRF draws the winning profile at random, weighted by tickets, so more votes give a profile better odds and no profile is guaranteed to win. The prize pool is only the $TTS voted on the winning profile. Without a club, the voting contract splits it 35% to the top voter, 35% to the winning profile’s wallet, 10% to the charity wallet and 20% to the house; with a registered club code, it is 35%, 35%, 10% charity, 10% to the club’s wallet and 10% to the house.

Then the part that answers the red flag. After the payouts, all $TTS left in the voting contract, meaning every vote on a profile that did not win, is sent to the burn address 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000dEaD. The 10% charity share is fixed in the contract and goes to the charity wallet set there, which the site and app label as Polaris Project donations, described in Crypto for Charity. At settlement the contract mints three TTS Round Trophy NFTs: one to the winning profile’s wallet, one to the top voter and one to the house wallet. The full walk-through is in Vote-to-Earn Round Mechanics.

How Do You Verify Temptation Token's Contracts Yourself?

Read them on a Base explorer. You do not need my word for any of this, and you should not want it.

Temptation Token runs on Base mainnet, chain ID 8453. The $TTS token contract is 0x5570eA97d53A53170e973894A9Fa7feb5785d3b9, an ERC-20 with 18 decimals, and it is not upgradeable: it was deployed directly, not behind a proxy. The voting contract, TTSVotingV3d, is 0x783b8cd80b586b723188c93ef94ee1beede617b4. The Trophy NFT contract is 0x02DDd0e63DC2A5F66Fdb5a46F5981191959AC9A5. The Uniswap V2 pool is 0x77Fe188379BEaAd3BCFb26c965c812CEa721ce68, and both that pool and the voting contract are tax-exempt, so swaps there and votes carry no transfer tax. Total supply read on-chain on 30 September 2026 was 69,000,000,000 $TTS.

Four steps, in order

• Paste each address into a Base explorer and confirm the source is verified. Verified contracts have their source code compiled and confirmed to match the deployed bytecode, which is the difference between reading the code and reading a claim about it.
• Open the voting contract and find the split and the burn address in the settlement path.
• Open a past settlement transaction and watch the transfers land in separate wallets.
• Check the token contract for a proxy. There is not one on $TTS, and you can see that for yourself rather than hear it from me. New here? Start with What is Temptation Token?

What Should You Still Watch Here After the Checks Pass?

Three things, and I would rather you hear them from me. The code does not fix the supply, settlement is triggered by us, and the bonuses come out of our own wallet.

The token contract has a mint function restricted to a minter role, and the 2-of-2 admin multisig can grant that role, so the supply is not fixed by the code. Settlement is triggered by the operator’s own keeper service; Chainlink Automation has not been used since August 2026. The one-time 500 $TTS signup bonus and the 1:1 first-vote match are paid by the operator from its own wallet, not by any contract, and we cap how many of each we pay per day. A wallet with no eligible stake can vote at most 500 $TTS in one vote transaction, so its match tops out there. Staking, described in TTS Staking Explained, is a design and is not yet available.

And the blunt ones, printed where you play: “Votes are final and non-refundable.” “$TTS is a utility token for playing the contest.” Transactions on Base are irreversible, so verify an address carefully before you send to it. Entrants must be 18 or older and pass a one-time ID check. An operator that will not write its own limits down is a red flag too.

Frequently asked questions

What is a soft rug pull?

A soft rug pull is a slow drain rather than a single theft: the team keeps selling, stops building and lets the project die while insisting it is alive. CoinLaw reports these rose 33% between 2024 and 2025. The tell is behavioural, not technical, so watch what a team actually ships over several weeks before you commit.

A soft rug pull is a slow drain rather than a single theft: the team keeps selling, stops building and lets the project die while insisting it is alive. CoinLaw reports these rose 33% between 2024 and 2025. The tell is behavioural, not technical, so watch what a team actually ships over several weeks before you commit.

Does a liquidity lock mean a token is safe?

No. A lock only means the pool cannot be withdrawn for a stated period by a stated holder, and CoinLaw found liquidity locking promises were broken in 45% of recent rug-pull cases. Read the lock contract, the unlock date and the share actually locked. A badge on a listing site is a claim, not proof.

No. A lock only means the pool cannot be withdrawn for a stated period by a stated holder, and CoinLaw found liquidity locking promises were broken in 45% of recent rug-pull cases. Read the lock contract, the unlock date and the share actually locked. A badge on a listing site is a claim, not proof.

Do I need ETH on Base to cast a vote?

Yes. Every Base transaction needs a small amount of ETH on Base for gas, including your vote. $TTS pays for the vote itself; ETH pays the network. You can top up ETH or USDC inside the app and swap, and the app refuses any purchase whose price impact would exceed 5%.

Yes. Every Base transaction needs a small amount of ETH on Base for gas, including your vote. $TTS pays for the vote itself; ETH pays the network. You can top up ETH or USDC inside the app and swap, and the app refuses any purchase whose price impact would exceed 5%.

The Bottom Line

Run the five on us. Read the token contract, read the voting contract, open a settlement transaction and watch the shares land in separate wallets. Check your own approvals while you are in there. The point of a checklist is that it works on everybody, including the person who wrote it, and ours was built so the answers sit on-chain rather than in a thread.

Then play one round. One round, one vote, and you will know more than any article can tell you. The app is at app.temptationtoken.io, the community chat is @TTSCommunityChat, and if anything in the contracts does not read the way I described it, write to me at jim@temptationtoken.io. Join.

Play at app.temptationtoken.io.

Sources

• What is a Rug Pull? DeFi and Exit Scams Explained — Solidus Labs
• Cryptocurrency Security and Fraud Statistics 2026 — CoinLaw
• Rug Pulls & Ponzi Schemes in Crypto Statistics 2026 — CoinLaw
• Rug Pull Statistics 2026 — CoinLaw
• Chainalysis report: impersonation and AI crypto scams surpass cyberattacks — CoinDesk
• How to remove liquidity from Uniswap v2 — Uniswap Support
• How to Revoke Token Approvals and Permissions — Revoke.cash
• How to revoke smart contract allowances/token approvals — MetaMask Support
• Base Verified Contracts — BaseScan