No tool or checklist can prove a token is safe. A token can pass every technical check and still collapse because the team walks away, or because nobody wants to buy it. What a checklist can do is catch the mechanical red flags that let a creator take your money directly. Those are the ones worth checking every time, because they take minutes.
You need the token's mint address, the long base58 string that identifies the token. Get it from the project's official channels or a reputable explorer, never from a reply in a chat. Scammers often launch copycat tokens with the same name and ticker.
Every SPL token has an optional mint authority, a key allowed to create new tokens. If it's still set, the holder of that key can mint billions of new tokens and sell them into the pool, crushing the price.
How to check: open the mint on a Solana explorer (or call getAccountInfo with jsonParsed encoding) and look at mintAuthority. If it's null, minting has been permanently revoked. For a memecoin or community token, a live mint authority is a serious red flag.
The freeze authority can freeze any holder's token account so those tokens can't be moved or sold. Some scams use this to let people buy and then stop them selling.
Check freezeAuthority in the same mint data. null means revoked. Context matters here: regulated stablecoins such as USDC keep freeze authority for legal compliance. For an anonymous new token, though, an active freeze authority is a major warning.
Look at the largest holders (getTokenLargestAccounts, or the holders tab on an explorer). Before you judge the numbers, exclude the liquidity pool account and any burn address. Those aren't people who can sell.
Red flags: - A single wallet holding a large share of the supply - The top 10 holders together controlling most of the supply - Several top wallets that were funded from the same source wallet shortly before launch, which often means a team allocation dressed up as separate buyers
High concentration doesn't automatically mean a rug, but it does mean one or two sellers can move the price dramatically.
A classic rug pull is the creator removing the liquidity backing the trading pair. Check: - How much liquidity there is relative to market cap. Very thin liquidity means even modest sells move the price a lot. - Whether the LP tokens are burned or locked, and until when. Burned LP can't be withdrawn. Locked LP can be withdrawn after the lock expires. - On bonding-curve launchpads, liquidity mechanics differ. Learn how that specific launchpad migrates liquidity.
Token metadata (name, symbol, image) may be mutable, meaning the update authority can change it later. That's less dangerous than mint or freeze authority, but mutable metadata on a brand-new token lets a scammer rebrand it to impersonate another project.
Look at recent transactions. Are there successful sells from different wallets, or only buys? A token where nobody seems able to sell is a possible honeypot. Token-2022 tokens can also carry extensions such as transfer fees or transfer hooks that tax or block transfers. Check whether the mint uses the Token-2022 program and which extensions are enabled.
Very new tokens carry the most risk. Check when the mint was created and when liquidity was added. Pair that with what you know about the team: are they public, and is there any real product?
A reasonable minimum for any token you're about to buy: 1. Mint authority revoked 2. Freeze authority revoked (unless it's a known regulated asset) 3. No single non-pool wallet controlling an outsized share 4. Liquidity burned or locked, and meaningful in size 5. Real sells visible from multiple wallets 6. No surprising Token-2022 extensions
If a token fails any of the first three, most experienced traders simply pass.
Doing this by hand on an explorer works, but it's slow when you're comparing many tokens. MintCheck reads these on-chain fields for any Solana mint address and summarises them in one view, on the web or through the Telegram bot @MintCheckSolBot. Treat the output as information to inform your own judgement, not as financial advice or a guarantee.