Checking one coin, step by step

Time to put it together. Here is a made-up coin, $PEBBLE, with numbers like the ones you meet in a real check. The steps go from quick checks to slower ones, so most bad coins are ruled out in the first minute.

Step 1: get the right address

A friend posts '$PEBBLE is sending'. Searching the name on DEX Screener returns six coins called PEBBLE. You copy the address from the pinned post of the official X account your friend linked and paste it in. One coin matches, and everything below uses it.

Step 2: the size

Price $0.000184. With 1 billion tokens, the market cap is $184,000. It is 3 hours old and has left its bonding curve for a pool.

Step 3: liquidity and volume

Liquidity is $52,000, so about $26,000 of SOL is in the pool, and the pool tokens were burned at graduation. 24-hour volume is $2.4 million from 1,900 makers. That is a lot for the size, but 1,900 different wallets is a real crowd. It passes, with a note: moves will be fast both ways.

Step 4: holders and the top 10

1,240 holders. The biggest holder is the pool with 14%, so set it aside. That fits the liquidity: 14% of a $184,000 coin is about $26,000 of tokens, the same value as the SOL beside it. The next ten wallets hold 21% together, none above 3.4%. On the headline numbers, the supply looks spread out.

Step 5: the dev

The dev bought 3% at creation and sold all of it 9 minutes later. The same wallet created 23 other coins in the last 30 days, and none of them got past a $40,000 market cap. That is a coin factory. It does not kill the coin by itself, since the dev has left. But nobody is building anything here, so the coin lives or dies on who holds it.

Step 6: bundles, snipers and fresh wallets

GMGN and Axiom both show a bundle at launch: 11 wallets bought in the same block as the creation and still hold 14% between them. None of them is in the top 10. Each holds between 1.1% and 1.4%, just under the cut.

17 snipers bought in the first two blocks and took 15%. Twelve have sold, and the five left hold 4%. 160 holders are wallets less than a day old. Bubblemaps shows 40 of them funded from one address within two minutes, holding 6% together, and a transfer line joins that address to the wallet that funded the bundle.

Step 7: add up the hands

Step 8: paid signals, socials and the chart

Dex paid: yes, with a small boost pack active. The X account joined this month, has 8,000 followers, and the replies are mostly emojis and the ticker. The chart ran to $260,000 in its first hour, fell to $90,000, climbed back to $210,000 and has made three lower highs in the last hour.

Paid signals show a budget, the socials are thin, and the chart shows sellers getting stronger, which fits a group selling into each bounce.

The verdict

$PEBBLE fails. Not because of one number, but because the numbers tell one story: a coin-factory dev, a bundled launch hidden just below the top 10, a fresh-wallet cluster tied to the same funder, and a chart where every bounce gets sold. One group holds a fifth of the supply and has every reason to sell it to you.

Notice that the headline numbers and the top 10 looked fine. It took the holder labels and the wallet map to see it. Never stop at the first screen.

The checklist

1. Get the address from the coin's own page or official account.
2. Market cap: how big is it already?
3. Liquidity: could you sell what you plan to buy?
4. Volume and makers: is the activity real?
5. Top 10, pool left out: how concentrated is it?
6. The dev: holding, sold or spreading tokens? How did their other coins end?
7. Bundles, snipers, insiders, fresh wallets: who got in first, and are they still holding?
8. Clusters: add up the wallets that are really one hand.
9. Paid signals and socials: advertising, not proof.
10. The chart: what are buyers and sellers doing right now?

Automatic bots, Trenchpilot among them, run checks like these first, but a brand-new coin has little to check. Doing it yourself a few times is still the best way to understand what a bot is looking at, and whether you trust it.