Aug 14, 2026 · 15 min · 12 segments
Thousands of new altcoins launch every day, but most are designed to enrich insiders and leave retail investors holding worthless bags. This video lays out the concrete signs every bad coin…
Now, I'm sure you're all aware of crypto's drawdown since right around the time the US president decided to launch a meme coin, so I won't go into much detail here.
But what's important to note is that even when prices are bleeding, opportunists in crypto continue to look for ways to extract maximum money wherever they can.
Estimates of what Rugpull stole in 2025 alone range from $2.8 billion to nearly $6 billion, depending on whose methodology you trust.
And sadly, the watchdogs that used to keep us safe are struggling.
Dapprader, one of the trackers that used to count this stuff, shut down in November 2025 because the business simply wasn't sustainable.
So the scams are scaling up while we have fewer entities exposing them.
And that means the only person reliably protecting your money in 2026 is you.
Let's start with a distinction that changes how you should look at every single coin.
A good risk in crypto is a solid team with a real product that may or may not work out.
That's investing.
You can lose money there and nobody did anything wrong.
But a rug is different.
A rug is a product built specifically to take your money.
And this entire video is about the second kind, because the second kind is the one you can and should avoid.
And the reason it's avoidable is that engineered extraction leaves fingerprints.
Real projects can't hide bad luck, but rugs have to hide intent, and that very often leaves a trail.
We're looking at a market full of nefarious actors with only a handful of real projects scattered between them.
So our job is to tell those apart.
Now, I'm sure you're all aware of crypto's drawdown since right around the time the US president decided to launch a meme coin, so I won't go into much detail here.
But what's important to note is that even when prices are bleeding, opportunists in crypto continue to look for ways to extract maximum money wherever they can.
Estimates of what Rugpull stole in 2025 alone range from $2.8 billion to nearly $6 billion, depending on whose methodology you trust.
And sadly, the watchdogs that used to keep us safe are struggling.
Dapprader, one of the trackers that used to count this stuff, shut down in November 2025 because the business simply wasn't sustainable.
So the scams are scaling up while we have fewer entities exposing them.
And that means the only person reliably protecting your money in 2026 is you.
Let's start with a distinction that changes how you should look at every single coin.
A good risk in crypto is a solid team with a real product that may or may not work out.
That's investing.
You can lose money there and nobody did anything wrong.
But a rug is different.
A rug is a product built specifically to take your money.
And this entire video is about the second kind, because the second kind is the one you can and should avoid.
And the reason it's avoidable is that engineered extraction leaves fingerprints.
Real projects can't hide bad luck, but rugs have to hide intent, and that very often leaves a trail.
We're looking at a market full of nefarious actors with only a handful of real projects scattered between them.
So our job is to tell those apart.
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