Pre-Launch/New tokens
Monitoring New Pairs, or pre-launch tokens, is a great way to find potentially legit coins before trading goes live, allowing you to get in early when it does launch.
For beginners, it is much much better to wait for experienced people to share tokens they have verified as safe or viable. Almost every token that’s launched is a rug. That being said, I will detail how I like to utilize custom alerts and live pairs to assess token viability and safety pre-launch / pre-trading.
When a token contract launches, an alert like the below one is sent to Consortium's "new-coins" channel. At a glance, you can immediately see the deployers funding source, whether or not the contract is verified, token taxes, honeypot status, its age, transaction count, total liquidity, relevant links, and more. If/when the coin is tradable, it will appear in Consortium's "trading-open" channel, where you can analyze and ape it in seconds.
The first thing to examine pre-launch is the deployer. From our alert, you can see the deployers funding immediately - ideally it is a CEX. You can click the deployer address to see their other activity as well. What you would like to see is a wallet with a CEX funding source (like Binance, Coinbase, etc.), few total transactions, and no incoming/outgoing eth to random other wallets. The deployer should be ‘clean’ - the only transactions should be getting eth from exchange, creating the contract, and the other contract functions they execute.
If I see the deployer was funded from a wallet that isn’t an exchange, I will follow that wallet to track it’s activity; you will often find these other wallets have made other rug tokens and are being lazy transferring ETH to themselves to make more rugs.
To quickly see if a token deployer or their funding wallets have launched other tokens, our alerts link previous contract addresses under "Contracts", as you can see in the above image.
Contract deployers having an ENS name also tends to be bullish if the rest of their account is clean. I have seen rugs use ENS too of course, but some legit ones will use an ENS as well.
The next thing to check is the contract (if its verified). If the contract is verified (green check in Etherscan next to ‘contract’), I will check it out on Etherscan and read the description to see what it says. If available, I will follow the links in our alerts or provided in the contract to measure the quality of their content.
Many rugs will still have a website, Telegram, Twitter, and/or Medium. Medium articles are a good judge of quality of a project, but are not a hard and fast metric to assess value from. Even some coins with super shitty websites, Mediums, etc. moon. Or some that have none of those things at all.
But when visiting one of those outlets, I am looking at the grammar, vocabulary, messaging, how unique their concept is, etc. to see if it seems legit/valuable or rushed, etc. The bar is low though - these ARE shitcoins after all, so the links even on good ones tend to be shitty.
Some websites or Twitters are too nice looking to be real, and are often just linked by scam tokens to look official. Make sure the website/Twitter, etc. mentions that specific token and shows the contract address somewhere.
If everything checks out and passes the initial “smell test”, I will add the token to a list of ones to watch - or sometimes track the deployer wallet to watch for any further activity.