What is a rugpull?
A rugpull is a coordinated exit-scam by a project's deployer or team — they drain liquidity, mint unbacked tokens, or transfer contract ownership in a way that collapses value, leaving holders unable to sell at a meaningful price.
Hard vs soft rugpulls
A hard rugpull is technical: the smart contract has logic the deployer uses to drain — pulling liquidity from a pool, minting unbacked supply, transferring ownership to an unrecoverable address.
A soft rugpull is economic: the team simply abandons the project, stops shipping updates, drains the treasury via "expenses", and the token bleeds to zero from neglect rather than a single drain transaction.
Both leave holders worse off. Detecting rugpull risk before buying requires monitoring contract permissions, liquidity locks, team holdings, and behavioral patterns over time.
Why agents must check rugpull risk
An AI agent recommending DeFi entries needs more than a price chart. The contract may be unverified, the deployer may still hold mint authority, and the LP tokens may be unlocked. Hive exposes detect_rugpull as a first-class MCP tool that aggregates signals from GoPlus, on-chain liquidity data, and contract metadata into a single risk score. The agent reads the score before recommending any trade — without it, the agent is essentially recommending blindly.