The market is gradually warming up, and the dawn of the "Shanzhai Season" seems to be faintly visible, but the issue of asset security cannot be ignored. Especially as we have become accustomed to not worrying about "Pixiu Pools" on Solana, and even take "dev sell" and "money pre-sale pools" for granted, "Rug Pulls" are still occurring, appearing in more deceptive forms, threatening our hard-earned money.
On September 9, ZachXBT posted on his personal channel that the Solana project Aqua is suspected of a Rug Pull, involving an amount of 21,770 SOL (approximately $4.65 million). Previously, this project had been promoted by Meteora, Quill Audits, Helius, SYMMIO, Dialect, and several KOLs. The related funds were split into four parts, first transferred to an intermediary address, and then flowed into multiple trading platforms.
Currently, the team has disabled the comment function on all posts on X (Twitter).
Compared to past "Rug Pulls," Aqua appears to be much more "legitimate." It has a real product, and relevant data about the product can even be found on defillama. Defillama data shows that Aqua, a Telegram trading bot, had a transaction volume of approximately $137 million in the past 30 days, with product revenue of about $2.83 million.
Aqua also had QuillAudits conduct a code security audit.
Meteora's official Twitter account retweeted Aqua's tweet to promote the project.
Helius also replied under the collaborative tweet released by Aqua.
Various project parties' official collaborations, along with recommendations from many KOLs in both Chinese and English, allowed Aqua to raise 21,700 SOL (approximately $4.65 million) through a token pre-sale, and all these funds have been transferred. Aqua's initial token liquidity was only 860 SOL (approximately $184,000).
@ReaperOfChains, after analyzing on-chain data, stated that the stolen funds from last year's $artic pre-sale scam involving over $20 million in IBXTrade flowed into the Aqua project. He believes that the mastermind behind IBXTrade must have participated in this Aqua scam in some way, whether directly or indirectly.
As of now, among the project parties that interacted with Aqua on Twitter, only Dialect's founder @aliquotchris has come forward to explain the situation. He stated that he only wanted to support a new team that used their developer tools, regretting the past decision, and is reviewing internal processes for future collaborations to minimize the possibility of such events happening again. Although Dialect's original tweet has been deleted to avoid directing more people to Aqua's related links, he attached the initial promotional tweet to the explanatory tweet to acknowledge what Dialect had done in a transparent manner.
In a sea of silence from project parties, this is quite rare.
On April 18, according to Cointelegraph, based on the latest report from blockchain analysis platform DappRadar, there were 21 Rug Pull incidents at the beginning of 2024, while there have only been 7 so far in 2025, indicating a decreasing frequency year by year. However, since the beginning of 2025, the Web3 ecosystem has lost nearly $6 billion due to such incidents, with 92% attributed to the collapse of Mantra's OM token (the token's founder denies it was a "Rug Pull"). In comparison, the total loss from Rug Pull incidents in the same period of 2024 was $90 million.
DappRadar analyst Sara Gherghelas pointed out that while the frequency of such incidents has decreased, their destructiveness has increased, with scams becoming more complex and often orchestrated by professional teams. The nature of these incidents is also evolving; in the first quarter of 2024, many originated from DeFi protocols, NFT projects, and meme coins, while in the same period of 2025, they mostly occurred in the meme coin sector. Gherghelas also warned that a sudden increase in the number of unique active wallets, high transaction volumes but low user activity, unverified smart contracts, limited GitHub activity, anonymous developer teams, or projects with sudden surges in DApp activity could all be warning signs of a "Rug Pull."
The Aqua scam serves as another reminder that even with reliable project partnerships, even with products that have undergone code audits, and even with extensive KOL promotions, "Rug Pulls" can still happen. There is no way to avoid the subjective malice of project parties, and when they engage in wrongdoing, there is no expectation that any related parties will step up to take responsibility.
We hope that "Rug Pulls" stay away from every player in the crypto space.
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