Building a project to detect scam tokens on the Solana network with 100% accuracy: the journey

Hello everyone,

Before I talk about the project itself, I want to explain why I started this journey.
Over the last two years, I lost more than $100,000 to scammers on Pump.fun and other projects across the Solana network. I’m also a software engineer, and I have advanced knowledge of the Solana ecosystem from hands-on experience as well as deep technical understanding. I work extensively with Rust, Go, and C#, and I’ve built many ultra-low-latency systems capable of executing operations in as little as 0.01 ms. The past year has been spent developing trading bots and pushing them to increasingly advanced levels.Eventually, I realized that none of these bots were truly successful.

Why?
Because every day, roughly 10,000–20,000 new tokens are created. Even though most trading bots offer more than 20 different filtering options, changing a single threshold by just one point higher or lower causes them to make mistakes. As time went on, I came to the conclusion that no rule-based bot would ever solve this problem. If anyone reading this is currently spending time building or optimizing these kinds of bots, I’d honestly recommend not wasting your time.

That’s when this became personal.


After realizing that approximately 99.8% of newly created tokens on Solana are designed for rug pulls, I decided to build something that could identify rug connections, analyze holder distributions, and expose the relationships behind scammers. I wanted to put an end to their entire playbook.
That decision led to a project that took roughly 6–8 months to build.
Today, the system works in real time on the Axiom Trade interface with roughly a one-second delay. Without opening any token details, users can instantly see holder distributions, rug connections, hidden wallet relationships, and many other risk indicators. I poured everything I’ve learned through years of experience into this project.
Two months ago, I published it on the Chrome Web Store and released it with a free daily usage tier.
I don’t want to go into the technical details because they represent the value of the time, money, and experience I’ve invested and lost throughout this journey.
Then I started wondering…


Pump.fun or Axiom could have built something like this themselves. So why didn’t they?
The answer seems simple. If they had developed infrastructure capable of exposing these scams, they would have earned far fewer fees because the fraudulent projects would become obvious before people bought them.
Imagine if everyone used software like this.
More than 10,000 Axiom users and over 100,000 Pump.fun users who buy several tokens every day would likely keep far more of their money instead of losing it to rug pulls. Even if users had no other advantage, they could trade without constantly worrying about being scammed.
But then who would lose?

Pump.fun and Axiom.

These platforms generate enormous amounts of fee revenue from trading activity, and many of those trades happen on tokens that ultimately rug. From a business perspective, they have little incentive to eliminate that activity completely.
I packaged the project into daily, weekly, and monthly subscription plans based on API usage. Without spending a single dollar on advertising, the platform has already grown to nearly 100 users.
The problem is that I’m now struggling to cover the infrastructure costs.
Even maintaining reliable Solana WebSocket connections has become difficult financially. As many of you know, Jito ShredStream offers one of the fastest propagation methods on Solana (around 200 ms), but packet loss means I still need to work with additional providers that offer reliable WebSocket data.
Apart from roughly $500 per month in API costs, there aren’t many other expenses.
The real problem is that I’m exhausted.
I own my own advertising company, yet I no longer have the energy to promote the project, market it, or continue carrying the workload by myself.
The money I lost and the years I invested became experience. That experience allowed me to understand the Solana ecosystem from end to end and build this project without leaving obvious gaps.
But now I’m genuinely burned out.
I’ve dedicated the last two years of my life to the Solana ecosystem, and the cost has been much greater than money. It affected my time, my family, my children, and nearly every part of my life.

So now I’d like to ask all of you:
What would you do if you were in my position?


How should I move forward?

good luck with the project

If this can fairly accurately predict which token is a rug pull. Wouldn't people just invest in them early and make money before the creators rug pull?

This is a promising journey, and good luck with your project!

MrZexi said:

If this can fairly accurately predict which token is a rug pull. Wouldn't people just invest in them early and make money before the creators rug pull?

Click to expand...

Knowing that a token will eventually rug isn’t enough. You’re competing against a fully automated bot ecosystem. The moment you buy, sell bots start executing, and after you exit, they often push the price back up to make it look bullish and lure in new buyers. Even if you manage to profit from one rug, why would you keep playing that game after losing money on hundreds of others? My goal isn’t to help people time rug pullsit’s to help them avoid those traps altogether.

Actually, after a while, many users turn it into gambling.
For example, once you’ve lost $5,000, you start chasing your losses. You see a token that’s moving quickly, assume it’s driven by real buyers, and think, “Even if I lose again, it doesn’t really matter.” So you keep buying.
If they were using a system like this instead, stopped treating it like gambling, and patiently waited for legitimate opportunities, it’s absolutely possible to buy 5–10 quality tokens per day and achieve 2x–10x returns over time.

The project is promising, and you already invested a lot of time and effort in it.

Are you covering the expenses with the current users? If so, in your situation I'd keep the thing rolling as long as it don't requires more of your time than the one you are sincerely willing to put in.

Or maybe step aside from this for a bit, take a break for a month or two to clear your mind and gain a broader perspective, seeing things from outside the loop helps gain deeper perspectives and reevaluate values.

There are two points, that you are well aware of, that will keep this from goin really really big; platform interests and the gambling approach most users take. But this project is a honest thing, and will help more than one conscious user on the ecosystem. Which makes it valuable.

Still, you should not put it above your own well being, you do seem the kind of person that may obsess over something they enjoy, and that sort of obsession, when unsupervised, kills the joy.

I think you're the only person that can figure out how to to move forward, and what exactly "forward" means under the given circumstances (your burnout, the limiting factors on the project). I'd take a deep breath or two, sip on some tea (or whiskey, whynot), and try to see the whole picture.

Maybe not the most specific advice, but I hope it helps at least a bit. You seem quite frustrated.

r4ven said:

The project is promising, and you already invested a lot of time and effort in it.

Are you covering the expenses with the current users? If so, in your situation I'd keep the thing rolling as long as it don't requires more of your time than the one you are sincerely willing to put in.

Or maybe step aside from this for a bit, take a break for a month or two to clear your mind and gain a broader perspective, seeing things from outside the loop helps gain deeper perspectives and reevaluate values.

There are two points, that you are well aware of, that will keep this from goin really really big; platform interests and the gambling approach most users take. But this project is a honest thing, and will help more than one conscious user on the ecosystem. Which makes it valuable.

Still, you should not put it above your own well being, you do seem the kind of person that may obsess over something they enjoy, and that sort of obsession, when unsupervised, kills the joy.

I think you're the only person that can figure out how to to move forward, and what exactly "forward" means under the given circumstances (your burnout, the limiting factors on the project). I'd take a deep breath or two, sip on some tea (or whiskey, whynot), and try to see the whole picture.

Maybe not the most specific advice, but I hope it helps at least a bit. You seem quite frustrated.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I’m honestly a bit angry. I feel like I wasted a lot of time, and during that time I hurt my family and the people around me, both financially and emotionally.
It would be nice to take a break and clear my head, but I don’t really have that luxury. I have responsibilities. I need to recover what I’ve lost and rebuild the reputation I damaged over the last two years.
I’m a pretty stubborn person. Everything I’ve lost and all the experience that came with those losses have brought me to where I am today, for better or worse. If I’m going to do something serious now, I can’t afford to waste any more time.
Right now my goal is to grow this project as fast as I can. I think you have to earn the right to stop and rest, and I don’t feel like I’ve earned that yet. First, I need to restore the reputation I’m about to lose completely, and then I need to keep fighting.

This isn’t just a dream anymore. I know there are tens of thousands of people who have gone through exactly what I have, and it frustrates me that a handful of people are making fortunes by exploiting them and forcing them into a miserable situation. For me, this has become a real fight.

If I have to, I’ll make the entire system free and do everything I can to make it accessible to everyone. I want to help put an end to the theft and scams happening here. First for myself, and then for everyone else, I want to build a provider people can actually trust.
Nobody deserves to go through this. People shouldn’t be scammed this easily. The platforms operating on Solana that stay silent while this continues shouldn’t only be thinking about filling their own pockets.
I want to change this, and one day be able to say that I actually made a difference.

Anger and resentment may look like powerful driving forces, but they don't lead anywhere good, and just accelerate your burnout and the pressure you'd be putting on yourself.

But your motives are clear, and you do know what you want to achieve. That's a lot.
The whole thing don't depends exclusively on you though, and there are multiple forces at play with all kinds of intentions.

Ethical internet? Ethical economy? They are coming. When, though, is partially in the hands of people. people like you, me and many others with good heart. But not only us. Others are trying to push it back as much as possible, so it will be a rough fight.

Regarding the break though, even if its a day or two to catch a breath and refresh your thoughts, I feel like it'd be helpful. Sincerely I slightly disagree with you regarding "having to earn the right to rest", we're not talking about taking a vacation here. It's just like when you workout... proper rest and diet are part of the whole thing, otherwise it's not sustainable in the long term, and there won't be real progress.

If you need someone to talk to, feel free to reach out and share your frustrations. dms are open.

Wishing you all the best with the project!

Ohhh the joys of getting rugged... Lol

thank u for all