How to check if liquidity is locked
Teams say liquidity is locked all the time. Checking takes about five minutes and needs no wallet, no permission and no reply from them.
1. Find the pool
Look the token up on whichever exchange or chart site covers the chain, and find the trading pair. What you want is the pool's own address, and how much liquidity is sitting in it. A token can have several pools, and a lock on the small one proves nothing about the big one.
2. Find who holds the position
Work out what the pool issues to liquidity providers. If it is an LP token, open that token's page on the block explorer and look at the holders. If it is an NFT position, find the owner of the position.
Whoever holds it can withdraw the liquidity. The question is who that is:
- A locking contract. Good, now check the terms in step 3.
- A dead address. The liquidity is burned and can never be withdrawn, which is stronger than a lock.
- An ordinary wallet. The liquidity is not locked, whatever anyone says.
3. Read the terms, not the badge
Finding a locking contract is not the end. Three things decide whether it means anything:
- How much is locked. Compare it to the total supply of LP tokens. Sixty per cent locked means forty per cent can leave today.
- Until when. A lock expiring in nine days is a countdown, not a commitment.
- Who can end it early. Read the locking contract on the explorer and look for an owner or admin with the power to withdraw, shorten or pause. If it has one, the lock is a promise by that owner rather than a property of the contract.
On Lockbox, paste the token address into the explorer and you get all three in one place, read live from the chain, with no wallet needed and no account.
4. Check the amount is actually there
A record saying tokens are locked is only worth as much as the balance behind it. Open the address holding them on the block explorer and confirm the balance matches what the record claims. This takes ten seconds and catches the crudest fakes.
Common ways this goes wrong
- A screenshot. Trivially faked. Always follow it to the chain yourself.
- A link from the team. It can point at a page they control. Search the token address yourself instead.
- The wrong pool. Liquidity locked on a pool with two thousand dollars in it, while the real market runs elsewhere.
- Locked liquidity, unlocked supply. The pool is safe and the team holds seventy per cent of the tokens, which they can sell into it whenever they like. Check both.
Then check everything else
Locked liquidity rules out one specific failure. It says nothing about the token contract, the supply distribution, or the people. The other things worth checking before you buy.