Farbeam

Five token risk flags to read first

2026-11-04 UTC · Farbeam research

A token report can hold up to 14 checks. If you have two minutes, these five carry the most information. Each one links a public field to a question you can act on. None of them says whether a token is good. A clean result does not mean safe, and a flagged result does not mean fraud.

The examples come from real token reports read on 2026-11-04 between 19:45:13Z and 19:47:42Z.

#Who can create more supply

Fields: is_mintable from GoPlus on EVM, mintAuthority from the mint account on Solana.

If supply can grow, your share can shrink, and whoever holds the power can sell into the market. The important follow-up is who holds it.

TokenReading
USDT on Ethereummintable warn: "The contract has a mint function."
WETH on Ethereummintable pass: "No mint function was found."
JUP on Solanamint_authority pass: "Revoked. No new supply can be minted."
mSOL on Solanamint_authority warn: authority still set, which is expected for a staking token

A staking token and a stablecoin both need minting by design. A community token with a live mint authority needs a question. On EVM a contract can also hide a mint path in a way the scan does not catch, so a pass is not proof.

#Who can stop or change your balance

Fields on EVM: transfer_pausable, is_blacklisted, owner_change_balance. Fields on Solana: freezeAuthority, balance_mutable_authority, closable.

These answer one question: can someone else block or change what you hold?

TokenReading
USDT on Ethereumpausable warn, blacklist warn, balance_change fail
USDC on Solanafreeze_authority warn: authority still set
WIF on Solanafreeze_authority pass: revoked

On Solana, a live freeze authority on a small token is a well-known warning, because the holder can stop you from selling. On a regulated stablecoin it is part of the design. The USDT and USDC anatomy goes through this in detail.

#Can the logic change

Field: is_proxy from GoPlus.

A proxy contract can replace its logic. Every other check describes the code as it is today, and an upgrade can change the result tomorrow. USDC on Ethereum shows proxy warn, and it also shows 6 unknown checks. A proxy often leaves a scanner with less to say, so read unknown here as "not checked".

On Solana, upgrades work differently. The mint fields do not tell you whether a program can be upgraded, and this report does not cover it.

#How deep is the market

Fields: liquidity.usd and pairCreatedAt from DexScreener.

CheckWarnFail
liquidity, total of up to 30 poolsBelow $100,000Below $10,000
pool_age, oldest poolBelow 7 daysBelow 1 day

Thin liquidity means a small trade moves the price a lot, and an owner of that liquidity can remove it. lp_locked adds to this on EVM: below 50% locked reads warn. On major tokens it often reads unknown, as it did for both USDT and USDC.

Use the pools list in the report as well. If one pool holds most of the liquidity, the total hides a single point of failure.

#Who holds the supply

Fields: holders[].percent from GoPlus on EVM, getTokenLargestAccounts from RPC on Solana.

TokenTop 10 shareResult
USDT on Ethereum46.2%warn, above 40%
USDC on Ethereum24.6%pass
JUP on Solana65.2%pass, the Solana warn line is 70%
RAY on Solana77.6%warn

Open the list before you draw a conclusion. The share includes pools, exchanges, bridges and lockers, and it often also includes vesting contracts. In the USDT report the largest holder was the wallet labeled Binance 8, at 16.845%, and that is an exchange wallet rather than one person. A token where most supply sits in a single pool will look concentrated even if no one person holds much.

#Reading the five together

Here is a sensible order for a first pass.

  1. Check sources. If a source failed, its checks are unknown.
  2. Read the supply and balance powers.
  3. Read proxy status.
  4. Read the market fields.
  5. Open the holder list and pool list, and classify the largest entries.

Then write down every unknown, because each one is a question that this report did not answer. A sample of 42 trending tokens in the trending pools note had 21 reports with at least one unknown.

#What these five miss

They do not cover the team, the code logic, an exploit that has not happened yet, off-chain promises or how a token trades on centralized exchanges. Also, a report shows a moment, and it uses caches of up to 5 minutes. All of it is public field reading. It does not predict price, and it is not financial advice.