What locked liquidity is and why it matters
The mechanism that stops (or allows) the developer from 'pulling the plug'
What it is, in plain terms
When a token trades on a decentralized exchange, there's a "liquidity pool": a reserve of the token and another currency (often SOL or USDC) that makes buying and selling possible without needing to find someone willing to make the exact same trade at the exact same moment.
Whoever creates that pool can, unless they explicitly lock it, withdraw its entire contents at any time — leaving anyone who bought the token with no way left to sell it.
Why locking makes the real difference
Locking liquidity means binding that pool with a contract (often managed by an independent third-party service, a "locker") for a defined period of time, or burning it permanently, making it impossible for anyone — including the developer — to withdraw it before expiry.
It's probably the single most important check for a newly launched token, where the risk of a sudden withdrawal is higher and more direct.
An important exception to know about
For a new token, with little liquidity concentrated in a single pool, a low percentage of locked liquidity is a serious warning sign.
But for a mature token, with substantial liquidity spread across many independent markets, the signal becomes much less decisive on its own: no single actor controls the majority of the overall liquidity, even if the locked percentage looks low in the aggregate calculation. This is exactly the case with BONK, an established and legitimate token that in our tests still showed a locked liquidity percentage under 20%, without this indicating any real risk.
How to verify it yourself
Tools like RugCheck.xyz explicitly show the locker status for every liquidity pool of a token, including how long they stay locked and who manages them.
CriptoCheck calculates a dollar-weighted average across all of a token's pools (not just the largest one), precisely to avoid being fooled by a single small pool being locked while the larger ones remain free.
Now that you know what it means, try CriptoCheck on a real token.
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