Aqua Scam Alert: How Rug Pulls Are Becoming Increasingly Sophisticated

The market is gradually recovering, and the dawn of “altcoin season” is emerging. However, asset security remains paramount. Even as we’ve become comfortable transacting on Solana without worrying about scams, with “developer sell-offs” and “fundraising presales” now an accepted part of crypto, rug pulls continue to occur—often in increasingly sophisticated forms that threaten genuine assets.

On September 9, ZachXBT posted on his personal channel, reporting that “Solana project Aqua is suspected of a rug pull involving 21,770 SOL (about $4.65 million USD). Previously, the project had promotions from Meteora, Quill Audits, Helius, SYMMIO, Dialect, and several key opinion leaders (influencers). The funds were split into four portions, transferred to intermediary wallets, and then distributed across multiple exchanges.”

Currently, the team has disabled comments on all posts on X.

Unlike typical rug pulls, Aqua appeared highly “legit.” The project offered a real product, and its data is readily available on DefiLlama. According to DefiLlama, Aqua—a Telegram-based trading bot—generated approximately $137 million in transaction volume over the past 30 days, with product revenue of about $2.83 million.

Aqua also commissioned QuillAudits for a code security audit.

Meteora’s official Twitter account retweeted Aqua’s post, endorsing the project.

Helius also replied to Aqua’s announcement regarding their collaboration.

With official partnerships and numerous endorsements from both Chinese and English-speaking influencers, Aqua was able to raise 21,700 SOL (roughly $4.65 million USD) through its token presale. The team moved all of these funds, while the initial liquidity pool for the Aqua token was only 860 SOL (about $184,000 USD).

After analyzing on-chain data, @ReaperOfChains revealed that stolen funds from last year’s IBXTrade $artic presale scam—valued at over $20 million USD—were funneled into the Aqua project. He believes the masterminds behind IBXTrade were also involved in the Aqua scam to some extent.

As of now, among all project teams that previously interacted with Aqua on Twitter, only Dialect’s founder, @aliquotchris, has publicly addressed the issue. He explained that they merely wanted to support a new team using their developer tools, but now regret that decision. Dialect is currently reviewing its internal processes to minimize future risk. Although the original promotional tweet has been deleted to avoid sending more users to Aqua, he included the initial promotion with his statement for full transparency.

Such openness is rare in an industry where most project teams remain silent.

On April 18, Cointelegraph reported that blockchain analytics platform DappRadar’s latest release shows 21 rug pulls occurred at the start of 2024. Only 7 have occurred so far in 2025, demonstrating a marked yearly decline. Despite this, since the start of 2025, the Web3 ecosystem has lost nearly $6 billion to such incidents, with 92% attributed to the collapse of Mantra’s OM token (whose founder disputes that this was a rug pull). By comparison, total losses from rug pulls in the same period of 2024 amounted to $90 million.

DappRadar analyst Sara Gherghelas noted that while these incidents are less frequent, their impact is greater, with well-organized teams designing increasingly complex scams. The nature of rug pulls is also evolving: in Q1 2024, most stemmed from DeFi protocols, NFT projects, and meme coins; in the same period of 2025, the meme coin sector dominates. Gherghelas warns that signs of a potential rug pull include sudden spikes in active wallets, high trading volumes with low user engagement, unverified smart contracts, minimal GitHub activity, anonymous developer teams, or DApps experiencing sudden growth.

The Aqua scam underscores that even projects touted by credible partners, even those completing code audits and enjoying widespread influencer backing, are still vulnerable to rug pulls. No safeguard can prevent a team’s intentional misconduct—and when it happens, it’s unrealistic to expect any related party to assume responsibility.

We hope rug pulls will become increasingly rare within the crypto community.

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