A liquidity lock is a rule enforced by code: the tokens that represent a trading pool’s money are locked away or burned, so the person who created the pool cannot take that money out. It is one of the most useful checks against a liquidity-pull rug pull, but it is not the only check you need.
Last updated Oct 26, 2026
A new token can only be traded if there is a pool: a smart contract that holds the token and a second asset, such as SOL, ETH, BNB or a stablecoin. Buyers put the second asset in and take tokens out; sellers do the opposite. The amount of money in the pool is the liquidity.
Whoever puts money into the pool receives liquidity-pool tokens, called LP tokens: a receipt for their share. Hand the receipt back and the share comes out of the pool together with its money. For a brand-new token the creator usually provides nearly all of the pool, so the creator holds nearly all of the receipts.
If the creator keeps the receipts in an ordinary wallet, they can pull the whole pool out at any moment. The price collapses and nobody else can sell for anything meaningful. That is a liquidity pull, the best-known kind of rug pull.
| State | What it means |
|---|---|
| Locked | The LP tokens are held by a locking contract until an unlock date. Nobody can pull the pool before that date. When the date passes, the owner of the lock can withdraw, or extend the lock. |
| Burned | The LP tokens are sent to an address that nobody controls, or destroyed. The pool’s money can never be withdrawn, by anyone. This is permanent. |
| Neither | The LP tokens sit in a normal wallet. The owner can pull the pool at any time. |
Simple pools hand out ordinary LP tokens, which can be locked or burned. Pools with concentrated liquidity, such as Uniswap v3 style pools, represent each position by an NFT instead, so a lock works on that position. Some launchpads do not use an ordinary pool at first: while a token is still on its launchpad’s bonding curve, there is no regular pool yet and nothing to lock, and Codex treats such a token as not yet graduated.
That is why Codex looks at the lock together with the other checks. (Rug pull guide)
The share of the liquidity that is locked or burned is part of the Trust score. In the Codex score, liquidity that is hardly locked or burned keeps a token in the Extremely risky band, and the more of it is locked or burned, the higher the best possible score. When the share cannot be found, that costs points too. Methodology →
Paste a contract address into Token Search & Risk Scan to see the share for a token.
Burned liquidity can never be withdrawn, so the risk of a liquidity pull on that pool is gone for good. A lock only lasts until its end date. Neither protects against the other kinds of rug pull.
There is no single safe number. The higher the share and the longer the lock, the smaller this one risk. Codex shows the exact share so that you can judge it together with the other checks.
With a standard time-lock contract, no: the contract holds the LP tokens until the date. Terms differ between locking services, so check the rules of the one that holds the lock.
In the result of a Codex scan, and on the pages of the locking service or the block explorer for the pool’s LP token.