rug pull

A project whose founders leave with the money. The one crypto term that has proved useful outside crypto.

Someone left holding an asset after everyone else has sold — the bag, the holding, the loss with a strap. From old trading slang into the internet's vocabulary, and now used about a Funko Pop collection, a streaming service, or an ex.

In February 2025 Changpeng Zhao said he would reveal his dog's name, and that he would not launch a coin about it. He revealed the name — Broccoli — and within hours several hundred tokens called Broccoli existed on BNB Chain, one of which reached a reported market value in the hundreds of millions. He had launched nothing. The chain launched everything.

A tool that draws a coin's holders as bubbles sized by holding and joined by lines where wallets have sent each other funds, so that a cluster of connected wallets holding a large share of supply is visible at a glance. The trenches use it to spot bundles; investigators used it in 2025 to show links between the wallets behind several high-profile launches. The chart that made 'same guy' provable.

Buying through many wallets at once so a launch looks popular — the mascot equivalent of a queue outside a shop that the shop paid for. The word the scene uses for the thing it accuses every successful launch of.

A coin announced on X by the President of the Central African Republic in February 2025 as an experiment to support national development, in a video so stiff that people ran deepfake detectors on it. Its reported market value passed half a billion dollars within hours and fell by more than 90 percent within days. The first memecoin launched by a sitting head of state; the record notes it was not the last.

The group chat that is said to be behind any mascot that does well — coordinated, secret, rich — which may or may not exist in any given case and is invoked in all of them. The scene's word for 'someone knew'.

A token launched in November 2024 using the Chill Guy cartoon — a dog in a grey jumper, hands in pockets — drawn by the artist Phillip Banks in 2023. Its market value was reported around $500 million within days. Banks said he had filed for copyright on the character, would pursue takedowns against unauthorised commercial use, and had received death threats over it. See Chill Guy for the drawing.