Rob | Brigid Forge

Who remembers XST? The token was heavily promoted on TikTok and reached roughly a $70M market cap. But Bubblemaps flagged something that should have made people stop and look closer: around 74% of the supply was concentrated in connected wallets, with one cluster of 244 wallets holding nearly half of the supply. And this is where I want to share something from my own experience. There was a guy I used to follow on X who regularly posted crypto analysis. Over time, I trusted his work. One day, he covered a new project that was about to launch. I trusted his research, got in around launch, and the next day the project disappeared. The Telegram was closed, the X account was gone, and even the original post from the guy I followed had been deleted. I don't know if he knew what was going to happen. He may have simply trusted the project himself. That's exactly the problem. Bad actors can use hype, influencers and convincing content to build trust while important information about the token is sitting in the background. We need more infrastructure across Web3 that promotes transparency and accountability from security and audits to tools that help investors understand what's happening behind the scenes. And at the foundation level, we need stronger safeguards around things like team allocations and how those holdings are secured. This shouldn't be a special feature. It should become the standard. Better infrastructure doesn't just make it harder for bad actors to exploit people. It helps good builders stand out and gives investors better information to make informed decisions. We can't eliminate every bad actor. But we can make the space harder to exploit. #Web3 #Crypto #TokenLaunch #Transparency

February 2025. $CATFI launches on Solana. Ca: 5AKD6AqoaHxuePTZUfSkiHM6gpCT4tJ6UMrNwDZGpump Within 26 hours, the token's price had jumped roughly 1,001× 🫠, attracting around 6,000 investors. Then came the collapse☠️ Prosecutors allege the people behind CATFI used fake social-media promotion, an account posing as an independent crypto influencer, manipulated follower numbers and multiple wallets to create the appearance of real demand. They then allegedly sold heavily, leaving 256 investors with combined losses of around ₩900 million roughly $600,000 😢. The defendants allegedly made more than ₩400 million, around $260,000 👀, from the scheme. The token had reached a market cap of roughly $8.37M before falling to around $12,170 within hours. And in May 2026, South Korean prosecutors charged five people in what was described as the country's first DEX rug-pull prosecution under its Virtual Asset User Protection Act. This is bigger than one token. People are learning about crypto every day. But when they see stories like CATFI, the question isn't just “How much money was lost?” It's “Why should I trust this industry with my money?” Money is looking for places to go. Builders are looking for capital. Investors are looking for opportunities. But trust is the bridge between them and every case like this damages that bridge. That's why we need more infrastructure built around transparency and accountability, from security and on-chain analysis to the launch layer itself. Investors should have better information before they put their money in, and good builders should have infrastructure that helps them prove they're operating differently. We can't eliminate every bad actor. But we can make the space harder to exploit and easier to trust. #Web3 #Crypto #DeFi #TokenLaunch

Just came across a new study that analyzed 6.4 million Solana memecoins across seven months. The researchers found that a vast majority showed rug-pull characteristics within the first hour of launch. What really caught my attention: their models could identify potential rug-pull behavior using just the first five minutes of trading data. We talk a lot about how easy it is to launch. Maybe we should be talking just as much about how we make those launches safer. Worth reading. 👇 | @arxiv arxiv.org/abs/2608.20271 #Solana #Web3 #Crypto #DeFi #Memecoins #TokenLaunches #Launchpads #BrigidForge