Trade labels
Alongside the conviction tier, every card carries a second word: 🚀 MOONSHOT, 🔥 HOT, ⚡ DEGEN, 🎰 GAMBLE or 💀 RUG-RISK.
People assume these are two views of the same thing. They are not, and reading them as one is the most common mistake made with our cards.
| Conviction tier | Trade label | |
|---|---|---|
| Asks | Is there substance behind this? | What is happening in the market right now? |
| Reads | Code, security, social, narrative, deployer, holders | Volume, buy pressure, concentration, rug markers |
| Timeframe | What was verifiable at launch | The last hour and the last day |
| Moves | Slowly. Facts about a project. | Fast. It is a momentum read. |
A token can be GOLD and GAMBLE — a real project nobody is trading yet. It can be MONITOR and HOT — thin substance, violent momentum. Both combinations are common and both are informative. Collapsing them into one number would destroy that.
The five labels
MOONSHOT
Every momentum condition and every safety condition at once.
- Hourly volume above 1.5× the pool's liquidity
- At least 2.5 buys for every sell in the last hour
- Largest holder at or under 20% of supply
- Deployer at least 7 days old, or funded from an established wallet
- No serious ticker collision
- Genuine reach — 50K+ follower KOLs, or an organic score of 70+
- Zero rug markers
Rarity. All seven, simultaneously. Most days there are none.
HOT
Strong, confirmed momentum without the full moonshot picture.
- Hourly volume above 0.8× liquidity, or $100K+ traded in 24h
- At least 1.5 buys per sell
- Largest holder at or under 30% of supply
- No serious ticker collision
- Zero rug markers
DEGEN
Real activity with at least one thing wrong.
- At least $20K traded in 24h
- And at least one caution flag: largest holder above 30%, a ticker collision, a deployer under a day old, or buy pressure that is only marginally positive
These flags cap the label here rather than escalating it. They make a token risky, not unsellable — and the distinction matters, because conflating them once stamped a rug warning on clean, sellable movers.
GAMBLE
Some volume, mixed signals, nothing lining up.
- At least $5K traded in 24h
- No coherent momentum picture
RUG-RISK
Actively traded and provably unsellable. Do not buy.
- At least $20K traded in 24h — enough that people are being taken
- And at least one rug marker: honeypot, cannot buy, confirmed wash trading, or a round-trip cost of 50%+
Reserved strictly for unsellable. A ticker collision, a concentrated top holder or an anonymous deployer are not rug markers — they cap the label at DEGEN and appear as their own badge.
The rule behind RUG-RISK
💀 RUG-RISK is reserved strictly for unsellable. Honeypot, cannot buy, confirmed wash trading, or a round-trip cost of 50% or more. Nothing else.
This is a deliberate narrowing and it came from a failure. An earlier version also fired on ticker collisions, high top-holder concentration and day-old anonymous deployers. The consequence was that clean, sellable, genuinely moving tokens arrived stamped with a skull — one had a clean tax verdict and fourteen organic sells on the chart and was flagged purely because twenty-two other tokens shared its ticker. The channel began to read as if everything were a honeypot, which is the same as the warning meaning nothing.
Risky-but-sellable signals still appear. They cap the label at ⚡ DEGEN and surface as their own badge on the card. The skull is not for risk. The skull is for "you cannot get out".
If you see 💀 RUG-RISK or a failed sell simulation, the token behaves like a honeypot. There is no version of this where buying it is the clever move.
Why MOONSHOT is rare
It requires seven conditions at once — momentum, buy pressure, distribution, a deployer with some history, no ticker confusion, genuine reach, and a completely clean safety record. Real tokens usually fail at least one.
We could loosen it. We would then see more of them, and the word would stop meaning anything. A label that fires often is a label nobody reads.
➡️ See also: Conviction score · The safety stack
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