DexScreener is a free website that shows live charts and trading data for tokens on decentralised exchanges, including almost every Solana memecoin. A token's page tells you its price, how much money is in its trading pool, how much it has traded and how many wallets have traded it. Read together, those numbers can show you warning signs, but every one of them can also be faked or misread.
Before It Rugs is not affiliated with DexScreener. Its layout changes from time to time, so labels on the live site may differ slightly from this guide.
Find the right page first
DexScreener lists trading pairs (a token traded against another, usually SOL or USDC), not just tokens. A popular name can have dozens of pages, most of them copycats. Search by the contract address (the token's unique ID), not the name, and check the address on the page matches the one you expected. See copycat tokens for why this matters.
DexScreener itself says its data is processed automatically with no human moderation. A token appearing there means nothing about whether it is safe.
The numbers at the top
Most pages show a panel of headline figures next to or above the chart.
| Figure | What it means | What to watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Price | The latest trade price, in US dollars and in the paired token | Moves fast on small coins, so it can be out of date in seconds |
| Liquidity | The value of the money in the trading pool | Low liquidity means your own trade moves the price, and selling can be hard |
| FDV | Fully diluted valuation: total supply (minus burned tokens) times price | For most memecoins this is the same as market cap |
| Market cap | Circulating supply times price. DexScreener relies on circulating supply reported by the team, so for most memecoins it equals FDV | Easy to inflate on a coin with tiny liquidity |
| Price change | Percentage moves over 5 minutes, 1 hour, 6 hours and 24 hours | A huge gain often means early holders are now sitting on profit they can sell |
Liquidity compared with market cap
This is the most useful single comparison on the page. A coin "worth" £2 million with £20,000 of liquidity cannot be sold at anything like that value. If several large holders tried to sell, the price would collapse. Market cap is a headline number. Liquidity is what you can actually get out.
Also check what kind of liquidity it is. Liquidity that can be withdrawn by whoever added it is a risk. Read liquidity locks and burns to see how to tell the difference.
Transactions, volume and makers
Below the headline figures there is usually a breakdown over different time windows:
- Transactions (txns): the number of trades, split into buys and sells.
- Volume: the total value traded, split into buy and sell volume.
- Makers: the number of different wallets that traded. Buyers and sellers are often shown separately.
These tell you more when you compare them. Big volume with very few makers suggests a small number of wallets trading back and forth, which can be fake volume (also called wash trading) used to get the coin noticed. Lots of buys but almost all the volume on the sell side can mean many small buyers are being sold to by a few big holders.
Warning: Wallets are free to create. A thousand makers might be a thousand people or one person with a script.
Reading the chart
The chart uses candles. Each candle covers a time period (you can switch between short periods like 1 minute or 5 minutes and longer ones like 1 hour or 1 day). A green candle closed higher than it opened, a red one lower. The thin lines (wicks) show the highest and lowest prices during that period.
Things that should make you cautious:
- One giant green candle at launch, then a slow bleed. Early buyers taking profit from later ones.
- A vertical red candle. A large holder selling or liquidity being pulled. If the chart drops almost to zero in one candle, it is often too late to sell.
- A perfectly smooth staircase upward. Often bots, not organic buying.
You can usually toggle between price and market cap on the chart. Market cap is easier to compare between coins.
The tabs under the chart
Under the chart there are tabs showing individual trades, top traders and holders. The holders view is worth a look: if a handful of wallets own a large share, any one of them can crash the price. Be aware that insiders often spread their tokens across many wallets to look smaller. Our guides to insider wallets and bundled launches explain how this works.
Boosts, ads and paid profiles
DexScreener sells promotion. Boosts are paid packs that temporarily raise a token's Trending Score for 12 to 24 hours, and a token with 500 or more active boosts gets a golden ticker. Projects can also pay for Enhanced Token Info, which adds a logo, description and social links.
None of this is checked as a sign of quality. Anyone with money can buy it, including people planning to sell to the buyers it attracts. Read DexScreener boosts and paid promotion for more.
What DexScreener does not tell you
DexScreener is a market data site. It is not built to show you who is behind a coin, whether the creator can still create new tokens or freeze yours, or whether the early buyers were all the same person. That is the gap we fill. Our live board takes public data from sources including DexScreener, GeckoTerminal and RugCheck and grades new Solana memecoins A to F on rug-pull warning signs.
Related
- DexScreener boosts and paid promotion
- Liquidity locks and burns
- How memecoin trading actually works (and why most people lose)
- What our grades mean