How to Spot a Bad Altcoin: 3 Checks on Holders, Unlocks and Revenue

You can analyze charts every single day, read all the crypto news, and still lose money because charts and news only tell you what the price already did, but they never show you if a coin is about to crash. And that's exactly what happened to more than nine out of 10 of the bigger altcoins that launched since 2024 because by this summer they were trading below their launch price and the typical one was down around 95%. And with Bitcoin above $80,000 and coins like QNT and Near running hard in September through October, this is exactly when most people buy the wrong coin. So before I ever put a single dollar into a coin, I always run my 60-second checklist to see if there's a real value behind it or if it's completely just hype. And if I ever find a one single red flag, I typically don't touch it at all.

It doesn't matter what big company or institution is behind it. It doesn't matter if some big crypto Twitter name is behind it. Heck, even some YouTuber, and yes, you're probably watching this on YouTube. Matter of fact, I don't even care if the entire crypto market is bullish on it because I've watched this happen for years now and I've been in the crypto game for over a decade and the numbers only get worse. Because in 2023 over 245,000 crypto projects stopped trading.

In 2024, it was over 1.3 million. And in 2025, it was over 11.6 million. And even the big launches didn't make it because in 2025, 28 new altcoins launched with a price tag of over $1 billion on day one. And by the end of the year, not a single one of those 28 was in profit. So I'm going to give you the exact 60-second checklist and we'll run it live on two real coins so you can spot a bad altcoin yourself before you lose thousands of dollars on it.

Now, if you're here to build a real wealth, protect what's yours, and be the first one to change your family's future, be sure to hit the subscribe button and comment bullish below. Also, as a quick side note, I'm giving away our 2026 altcoin trading strategies and crypto yield generation brief to everyone who follows us over on Instagram at Bull Runners. You can find the official link down in the description below this video. If you're on mobile, click the three dots or more to find that link. Now, let's run it.

What's going on, Bull Runners? Welcome back to the channel. If you're new here, my name is Paul, and you can find me on Twitter or X at Crypto Paul. So, the first check is who's actually holding the coins because the price only stays up as long as the people holding them don't sell. And if a small group of wallets has almost all of the coins, that group decides what happens to your money if you invest.

You can see this for free on a website called Bubble Maps, where you just type in the name of the coin. It shows you every big wallet as a bubble. And when the bubbles are connected to each other, those wallets most likely belong to the same people. So, what you're looking for is how much of the coin is in the biggest group because if that one group has most of the coins, it's the biggest red flag you can find. Now, this isn't an exact science, but it's a pretty decent start.

And one of the best examples is the Hawk Token, launched on December 4th of 2024 by Haley Welch, who is known on TikTok and Instagram by most people as the Hawk Tu A Girl because in just a few hours, it went up to $490 million and the people were buying it like crazy. But less than an hour after the launch, Bubble Maps posted this. Hawk didn't disappoint. 96% of the supply is in one single cluster, which means 96 out of every 100 coins were in one connected group of wallets and everybody else was buying the four that were left, meaning it was low flow. It could pump really hard really quickly, but if at any point in time, the people or the group that owned the 96% wanted to sell, everyone lost money.

And because of this news, in less than 3 hours, Hawk was down 91%. Many people called this a rug pull and a complete scam. And according to Bubble Maps, the early backers sold $3.3 million worth of Hawk right at the launch to the people who came in late. So, that's exactly why Coffeezilla said this in one of his popular crypto investigation.

Hey, when you make millions of dollars on launch, where does that come from? When your insiders sell $3 million, where does that come from?

And the answer is that it came from regular people who only looked at the price going up. Now, of course, Hawk was just a meme coin, but this isn't just a meme coin problem. It happens everywhere. Because before Mantra crashed 90% in a single hour, which I'll show you in a minute, reports said up to 90% of its coins were controlled by the team. The team obviously denied it, but Mantra wasn't a joke of a coin.

It wasn't a meme. It was an altcoin worth around $6 billion. or HBAR or Ethereum, Solana, you already know who holds the bigger bags because it's out in the open and it's on schedule. So, this first check is most useful with newer coins and with bigger altcoins and the ones that get listed on Binance. The real danger is in the coins that aren't out yet at all because when a new altcoin launches, only a small part of its coins are actually for sale. The rest are locked up and most of it belongs to the team and the investors who got in long before you and long before any listing on a decentralized exchange or a centralized exchange.

In Binance's own research team found that for the coins launched in 2024, only around 12% of the supply was trading. So, for every coin you could buy, there were around seven times more waiting to come out of these locked wallets. Often, we'll call this a vesting schedule. And the reason this is important is because the market cap is just the numbers of coins times the price. So, if a project is worth $1 billion and it has 100 million coins trading, each coin is worth $10.

But if another 100 million coins comes out and no new money steps in, which is unlikely to the tune of another $10 100 million coins, that same $1 billion is split between 200 million coins. So, each coin is now worth only $5. You need equal amounts of demand for all of that new supply at the same price, which makes it very difficult for any crypto to really rally. Now, to check this, you go to CoinGecko or a CoinMarketCap. Then, you type in the coin and you look at two numbers.

The first one is the market cap. In the case of something like Chainlink, we're sitting at $9.88 billion. The second one is the fully diluted valuation, which is sitting at $12.88 billion, which is the value of the coin if every locked coin was in circulation, meaning not all of this supply is currently in circulation because something like Chainlink has a total supply or a max supply of 1 billion tokens, and currently there are only 766 million in circulation, which means that there will be more unlocks and more of the tokens that are going to reach the market, which could put pressure on the price. So, when the number is four or five times bigger than the first one we just looked at, it means most of the coins are still locked, and it's likely going to face some severe uphill pressure. And that's a problem because every locked coin is a coin that somebody can sell later, and you're the one who's supposed to buy it.

Now, I will state that for many of these older coins or some of the biggest ones, this is no longer a serious issue, but back in previous cycles it was. This is definitely an issue for newer tokens right now because even a big coin like XRP has around 32 billion coins locked up with Ripple, and that's only around a third of the supply. And it's been coming out of that same public schedule since 2017, and Ripple locks most of it right back up every single month in something they call an escrow. So, it's important to note that the red flag isn't that some coins are locked, it's when most of the coins are still locked and they're about to land in the hands of people who got them for almost nothing. That's exactly what happened to Berachain, a new blockchain that launched in February of 2025 and got listed on Binance.

Because on the first day, its coin Bera went up to $14.83, but four days later the whole project was valued at $2.7 billion if you counted every coin. While the coins actually trading were worth only 589 million. So, almost four out of every five coins were still locked. And now, Berachain is at around $0.23 down 98% below that first day. And it's not just one coin because a firm called Memento Research tracked 118 coins that launched in 2025.

And remember those 28 coins with a price tag of over $1 billion? That price tag was the fully diluted value. So, the first-day price times every coin that would ever exist. And by the end of the year, not a single one of them was in profit, which means the bigger and more hyped the launch was, the more money people lost. But knowing how many coins are locked is only half of the check because you also need to know when they come out and [music] who gets them.

And what's so cool is that you can actually see this stuff on a free website called Tokenomist, where you get the date of the next unlock and how many coins are coming. And the reason this is so important is because Keyrock, a company that trades crypto for a living, studied more than 16,000 unlocks, and 90% of them pushed the price down. And the worst ones were the unlocks that went to the team because those came with a price drop of almost 25%. But what makes it even more dangerous is that the price often starts falling 30 days before the unlock even happens. People are preparing for it.

They know the unlock is going to occur, and they know that they're going to get screwed by a team more often than not. So, by the time most people hear about an unlock, the damage is already done. And then there's one coming that a lot of people in crypto are watching, and it's on a coin called Monad. Monad launched its blockchain on November 24th of 2025, and only around 12% of its coins were trading. But on November 24th of 2026, exactly 1 year after their launch, the team's coins start to unlock, and so do the early investor coins.

And for the team alone, that's around 10.7 billion coins, almost as much as everything that's currently trading right now. And the investors get around 4.9 billion more on the same day. So, that's why Arthur Hayes, the co-founder of BitMEX, said this about Monad.

It's going to go down 99% because it's another high FDV, low float.

a side note, FDV is just short for the fully diluted value I showed you. And the low float just means only a few of the coins are actually trading. So, what he's saying is that too many coins are still locked, which is not good for the token, for the price, and for any retail investors such as me or you. Now, to be fair, Monad hasn't crashed because it's still trading right around the price it sold at in its public sale. But when you know the date, a sudden drop can't catch you by surprise.

However, not every unlock ends badly because some coins get millions of new coins every single month, and their price still goes up. And the reason is the third check. Because for the price of any coin to stay up with new coins coming out, somebody has to keep buying them. And the most reliable buyer a coin can have is the project itself. When it takes the money it makes and buys its own coin back.

So, the third check is how much money the project makes and how much of that money they make goes back to the people holding the coin when they buy it. We call these buybacks, and you can see that on DeFi Llama, which is also free. And you only need to look at two lines. The first one is the fees, so the money people paid to use the project in the last 30 days. And the second one is the holders revenue.

So, the part of that money that went back to the coin. In the case of something like PONDZ, you can see that we're looking at 52 million in fees over 30 days, while holder revenue is sitting at 8 million. So, when both of them are closer to zero, the only thing keeping the price up is hype and a narrative, but not real use. And when the hype runs out, typically the project dies. Because according to CoinDesk, more than 100 crypto projects shut down or went bankrupt in 2026, and that was only by August.

And this isn't meme coins or something anyone can launch on any decentralized exchange. These are legitimate companies that probably raised a boatload of capital to go build something in crypto, and they still went under. And the pattern CoinDesk found is that people were using these projects, but the projects weren't making any money. And the most painful example is Mantra. Because if you counted every coin, OM was valued at 9.5 billion dollars at one point in time.

And people had only put 13 million dollars into the project itself. So, for every dollar that was actually inside the project, the coin was priced at more than 700 dollars. And on April 13th of 2025, OM fell from over 6 dollars to around 40 cents in about an hour. Now, the team blamed the exchanges for that crash, and nobody has proven who actually sold, but obviously selling had to occur for this to happen. The question is who?

And when you look at those types of tokenomics, you can reasonably assume when a coin is priced 700 times above the money actually in the token, it didn't require much selling at all from any team for it to fall. So, now let's actually run these checks on two coins side by side, and see if it really takes close to 60 seconds. Now, the first check is made for coins that launch on another blockchain, like Hawk did. And because Monad and Hyperliquid are their own blockchains, we go straight to the second check where both of them fail. Because Monad is valued at $2.8 billion if you count its FDV with only around 290 million of it trading, and its team and investor unlock is coming on [music] the 24th of November.

And Hyperliquid is valued around $78 billion with only around $18 billion trading, while up to 9.92 million new coins can unlock for the team every single month. So, if you stopped here, you'd say these two coins are exactly the same. But on the third check, Monad made around $460,000 in fees in the last 30 days, and that's for a coin valued at nearly 3 billion. And in those exact same 30 days, Hyperliquid made around $86 million in fees, and around 70 million of that went to buying the Hype token back. Hence, why Hype has so seriously outperformed most other cryptos in the market.

This has led Hype to nearly triple its value in a single year, even with new coins coming out every single month. Because back in March, out of the 9.92 million coins the team could have taken, they only claimed around 173,000. So, less than 2%. So, the coins were there to take, but the team mostly left them alone. And this month, when the team did take 3.75 million coins, they sold all of them to one big institution in an OTC deal or a private deal instead of dumping them on the open market, which was really smart.

Now, even a coin like Hype still comes with real risk because the coins that unlock every month are worth a lot more than when the project buys back. So, if those holders ever decide to sell, the buyback can't stop it. But, you know about it now, and a sudden drop likely won't catch you off guard. But, you'll notice something about this. We covered Monad and how it has a red flag.

We covered Hype and how it also has a red flag. One failed check doesn't make a coin bad, but it tells you exactly where the risk is before you put your money in. Still, it's important to note that a coin can pass every single check, and you can still sit there for 6 months making $0 while everyone else is doubling their money in some other crypto. And that's because we really need demand behind it the token. It's also important to note that these three checks are likely built for newer coins, the ones that launched in the last year to 3 years.

But, there are coins that have been around for more than 10 years, and they're not going to zero. And if you're holding any of the bigger coins like XRP, Solana, Cardano, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Take XRP, one of the biggest coins in the world with a market cap around $86 billion. Because even if you held for the last 250 days, you'd basically be at break even. You'd have the same amount of money you started out with.

But, in that exact same period of time, if you bought Hype, you'd be up over 145% and even Zcash went up more than 600% in that same period of time. And the reason this hurts so much is because it doesn't feel like you did anything wrong. You didn't lose any money, but you definitely didn't make any money in that period of time. Many people do it because they know that it's safer, but your money stood still while other people doubled or even tripled theirs. Now, that doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with XRP because this is exactly how XRP has always moved for well over a year, in 2023 and 2024, XRP stayed flat and stuck between 50 to 60 cents.

So, in that time frame, a lot of people got bored and sold. And right after that, it went to over $3 in just a few short months. And it's already turning again, because from June 30th to the end of September, XRP went up over 40%, which is even more than hyped it in that same period of time. So, the problem was never the coin itself. It's having all of your money in one coin while it's in its [music] quiet season.

And there's a simple way to see which season a coin is in, and it only takes 5 seconds. Instead of looking at the price in dollars, you look at the price against Bitcoin. Because if a coin goes up in dollars, but goes down against Bitcoin, you've made more money just holding Bitcoin, and the biggest coin in crypto. And that's why my team treats Bitcoin as the anchor that everything else gets measured against. So, when that line starts going up, it means money is moving into that coin faster than into Bitcoin.

So, now you know how to spot a bad coin, and how to spot a good coin in a quiet season. But you're probably wondering why coins like QNT and NEAR went up four times and two and a half times in a few weeks in September. And more importantly, if these checks that we just shared with you would have caught them. Because in September, a few of the bigger altcoins also went crazy. QNT more than quadrupled in a few days.

NEAR went up more than 150% and Uniswap went up more than 80%. And if I'm being completely honest with you, none of these checks would have told you that was coming. Because QNT ran when America's biggest banks picked its technology. NEAR ran into the launch of the first US ETF for NEAR. And Uniswap ran when CME announced futures on it.

So, the news is what starts a run like that, but what happens after the news is where the third check comes in. Because since February 23rd, the money that Near makes from its trading app is used to buy Near on the open market. And Uniswap started doing the same thing back in December when it began using a part of its fees to buy Uni and destroy it. So, in September alone, around $15 million went into taking Uni off the market. And Hyper Liquid does the same thing with Hyper, like I just showed you.

So, when a coin takes the money it makes and buys its own coin back, there's a buyer that shows up every single day with far more money than your typical retail investor. Which means it can continue rallying even after the headline is gone. And that's why coins like this are so rare, because out of those 113 bigger altcoins from the start of the video, only eight were still above their launch price this summer. Now, coins like Bitcoin or XRP don't do this at all. And they don't need to, because they've been around for over 10 years and their supply is out in the open.

They have a lot of mind share. They're far larger market caps that are actually justified. So, those ones are less likely to be affected by these types of scenarios. But still, the three checks that I shared with you in this video tell you which coins to stay away from, but they don't necessarily tell you the right coin before the news hits. Which is a completely different beast.

And that different thing is exactly what my research team does inside of our private intelligence network. Because the 60 seconds I just showed you are only the first step of what our team does when we're researching a token. After that, they go through the documents, follow the wallets, and watch every unlock date. And that takes hours every single day. And all of it happens before our members ever even hear about that coin.

And if you try to do all of that alone, or maybe you're too busy to do that stuff because it is a lot of work, considering many of our clients have a job and have a family, they typically be burnt out adding a second job to their plate. But that's exactly how one of our coaches found hyper liquid and called it the L1 exchange killer when it was under $30 back in November of 2024. And on September 23rd, HYPER almost $98, more than three times that call. And one member told us he was full of fear before he joined, and a month later he was holding a coin that had gone up over 300%. Now, of course, these results are not typical, so don't be typical.

Obviously, crypto carries some risk, which is why you can't rely solely on a YouTube video. You do need to do your research, but we also show members how to put their crypto to work while a coin is in its quiet season, so their money isn't just sitting there. And every single member inside of our program gets help with their own portfolio, so we can only take a few people on at a time because this is one-on-one help. So, if you're serious and you want to join a group of other serious investors in the crypto space to really crush it this year, especially because we're at the start of a bull market, then you can click the very first link down in the description. If you're on your mobile or a phone, be sure to click the little more button and you should see those links pop up.

And then you can watch that free brief that looks something like this. And it's no worries if you're not the right fit, this isn't the right thing for everyone, we'll be sure to tell you straight up. But either way, after the call, you'll feel a heck of a lot better and like you have a heck of a lot more clarity, so you truly have nothing to lose by simply checking it out. Either way, this is kind of like fast-tracking that whole step of doing a boatload of research yourself into a token, so you don't miss the next one. Either way, that is it for the video, my friend.

I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, be sure to subscribe to the channel. And as always, you know what to do. Stay bullish and goodbye.