Second issue of the roundup. Every Saturday we publish what rugged on Ethereum mainnet over the past 7 days - names, addresses, dominant flags, and short case studies on the most telling deployments. Goal: a stable weekly receipt of the rug-pull pipeline so the data compounds.
The week in numbers (May 25-31, 2026)
| Day | Rugs flagged | ETH withdrawn (operator) | Net profit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sun May 25 | 105 | 199.4 ETH | 105.4 ETH |
| Mon May 26 | 117 | 275.9 ETH | 162.0 ETH |
| Tue May 27 | 127 | 223.0 ETH | 128.2 ETH |
| Wed May 28 | 144 | 1,006.4 ETH | 550.5 ETH |
| Thu May 29 | 89 | 129.2 ETH | 60.9 ETH |
| Fri May 30 | 103 | 506.0 ETH | 385.6 ETH |
| Sat May 31 | 80 | 78.1 ETH | 68.3 ETH |
| Week total | 780 | 2,418 ETH | 1,476 ETH |
1,476 ETH net = roughly $3.7M at the May 31 ETH/USD price. Down from week #1 in count (1,469 high-risk contracts last week) but up in extracted value, driven entirely by two outlier days: May 28 alone saw 550 ETH withdrawn - more than the previous three days combined.
That spike has a single cause.
Two whales ate 46% of the week
Of the 1,476 ETH net profit, 680 ETH (46%) came from just two contracts:
| Token | Symbol | Profit (ETH) | Score | Rugged |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenTrade | $OPNTR | 388.98 | 70/100 | May 28 |
| Cycles | $CCLS | 291.62 | 80/100 | May 30 |
These are both brand-jacks of real projects. OpenTrade is a legit institutional credit protocol; the rugger registered an ERC-20 with the same name to catch retail buyers searching the brand. Cycles mirrors the same playbook against a different real project. Together they account for almost half the week’s total operator profit - without them, the median rug of the week was the same 7.5 ETH template we documented in Wednesday’s 7.5 ETH rug template article.
Pull these two outliers out of the math and the remaining 778 rugs averaged 1.02 ETH net profit per contract. Add them back in, the average jumps to 1.89 ETH - pure outlier bias from two whales.
The standard rugs after the outliers
Sorting the remaining contracts by ETH profit shows the script-driven cluster the previous article identified - the 7.5 ETH gas-floor template:
| Rank | Token | Symbol | Profit (ETH) | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | Zest Protocol | $ZEST | 37.63 | 70 |
| 4 | Moon Pay | $MOON | 34.63 | 70 |
| 5 | Stablehouse | $HOUSE | 7.76 | 70 |
| 6 | Memecoin Packs | $PACKS | 7.65 | 70 |
| 7 | Hermes Agent | $HERMES | 7.58 | 80 |
| 8 | grail | $GRAIL | 7.49 | 60 |
| 9 | Bamboo | $BAM | 6.72 | 70 |
| 10 | Sushi Roll | $SUSHI2 | 2.25 | 80 |
The cluster around 7.5 ETH ± 0.5 is exactly the gas-floor of viable rug pulls that we showed in Wednesday’s piece. The arithmetic is unchanged: 10 ETH initial LP, 17.5 ETH withdrawn on exit, 7.5 ETH net once gas and the seed deposit clear. Different ticker, same operators iterating on what is profitable enough to ship at scale.
Five brand-jacks in the top 10 alone: Zest Protocol (real Stacks BTC stablecoin), MoonPay (the fiat onramp), Stablehouse (institutional yield), Memecoin Packs (real card-trading project), Sushi Roll (riffing on SushiSwap). The pattern is the same one we documented in the top 10 brand-jacked tickers: a known name + an unverified contract + 10 ETH of seed liquidity, every week, on rotation.
The emoji-symbol distribution trick
Three contracts this week shipped tickers that begin with an emoji character:
- 🙌JWN (JollyWayne) - May 26 - 2.37 ETH profit, score 80
- 🧊FZP (Frozen Peaks) - May 27 - 2.26 ETH profit, score 70
- 👻GHLQ (Ghost Liquidity) - May 27 - 2.24 ETH profit, score 80
This isn’t decorative. DEX aggregators sort search results alphabetically and Unicode emoji code points sit far before standard ASCII letters in the sort order. Putting 🧊 in front of a ticker pushes that token to the top of the search results when a retail buyer searches anything close to the name. We added a flag for it (emoji_symbol) two weeks ago after spotting the pattern on a $UMI emoji-variant. Three more deployments this week confirms it’s a script-level technique, not a one-off.
What this means for buyers
The numbers compound in a way that’s worth restating from last week:
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Brand-jacks make up half the top 10 every week. $OPNTR / $MOON / $HOUSE / $PACKS / $SUSHI2 this week. $WILMA / $TEMPO / Golden Tempo last week. The script doesn’t care which name is trending - it just rotates onto the next one that has Google search volume. The defence is the same: never buy a token because you read the ticker on Twitter; paste the contract address into a scam detector first.
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The 7.5 ETH template is the floor. Most operators ship contracts they expect to clear roughly 7-10 ETH on, full stop. The 388 ETH whale rugs like OpenTrade are statistical noise - they happen when a brand-jack accidentally catches a real influencer mention. Most of what’s deploying is mechanical: 10 ETH bait, 17.5 ETH exit. Knowing that lets you predict, when you see a fresh 10 ETH pool, where it’s going to end up.
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Emoji-prefix symbols are an active surface. If you see a token whose ticker starts with a non-ASCII character on a DEX aggregator, that placement was engineered. Skip it.
Paste any contract address into app.rektradar.io for a free score, or use the rug pull checker for the no-signup version.
See also
- Weekly rug roundup #1 (May 18-24, 2026) - last week’s 1,469 high-risk contracts
- The 7.5 ETH rug template - Wednesday’s piece on why the cluster around 7.5 ETH is the gas-floor
- Stripe Tempo brand-jack - Thursday’s piece on how the wave of Golden Tempo honeypots was timed to the launch announcement
- Top 10 most brand-jacked tickers on Ethereum (2026 data) - the standing leaderboard the OPNTR / MOON / HOUSE deployments slot into
- How much ETH is stolen by scam tokens - the 90-day running total
Next issue lands Saturday June 7. Follow @mik3fly__ on X for the heads-up.