Curriculum·J306 Smart Contract Risk for Non-Developers·about 32 min
The rug taxonomy
By the end of this lesson you can
- →Classify an exit scam by the mechanism that executes it, not by the story around it
- →Map which categories the J306-01 and J306-02 checks catch, and which they miss
- →Compute the base rate you are drawing from when evaluating new tokens
- →Treat a liquidity lock expiry as a dated deadline rather than as a safety property
Junior · enrolled learners
This lesson opens with The base rate, measured.
- What happened
- This is a population finding rather than a single incident, and it is labeled as such. Chainalysis reported that in 2021 rug pulls accounted for about 37 percent of all cryptocurrency scam revenue, more than any other category including Ponzi schemes and phishing, totaling over $2.8B out of more than $7.7B of scam revenue that year. A later report found that 74,037 tokens launched during 2024 were suspected of being linked to pump and dump schemes, which the same analysis put at 3.59 percent of all tokens launched that year. Dividing those figures implies roughly 2.06 million tokens were launched in 2024 alone.
- The decision point
- The rate is a floor rather than an estimate, because it counts only what somebody classified afterwards, and per S203-04 the schemes that were never identified are absent from the numerator while remaining in the denominator. What the figure establishes is the prior you are drawing from when you evaluate an unfamiliar token: not a rare pathology to be alert for, but roughly one identified case in every twenty-eight launches, in a population of over two million.
- Recorded loss
- $2,800,000,000
What you will be able to answer
- →What are the seven rug mechanisms?
- →Which categories do the contract checks catch?
- →What is the measured base rate?
- →What is a liquidity lock?
Orientation and Year One are open: anyone can read them without an account. From Year Two onward the lessons are for enrolled learners, because progress through the later years only means anything if it is tracked against a record.
It is free. We do not sell the list and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Sources and review
- https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/12/17/defi-rug-pull-scams-pulled-in-28b-this-year-chainalysis
- https://coincodex.com/article/13190/users-lost-77-billion-to-crypto-scams-in-2021-according-to-chainalysis-report
- https://deepstrike.io/blog/rug-pull-statistics
- https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2025/01/01/how-squid-games-success-led-to-one-of-biggest-rug-pulls-in-2021/
Confidence medium·Volatility medium·Reviewed 2026-08-06·Owner unassigned
Contested
Marked medium confidence because scam classification methodology varies between analysts and between years, and the two figures used here come from different reports covering different periods. The derived total of about 2.06 million launches follows arithmetically from the reported 74,037 and 3.59 percent and is presented as such.
J308-02 owns governance as an attack surface, including vote buying, delegation concentration and treasury capture. This lesson names the governance rug as a category and defers the mechanics. Keep the split.