Methodology
Trench Scope does not predict price direction. It measures how many red flags are visible in on-chain and DEX data. Every rule below is exactly what the code uses.
Risk score
The score starts at 0. Each red flag adds points, and the total is capped at 100. A score of 0 to 24 is low risk, 25 to 54 is medium risk, and 55 or higher is high risk.
| Category | Condition | Points |
|---|---|---|
| Contract | Honeypot detected | +60 |
| Pool | No DEX pool found | +40 |
| Pool | Liquidity under $10K / under $50K | +25 / +12 |
| Pool | Liquidity below 5% of market cap | +10 |
| Pool | Pool younger than 24 hours / younger than 7 days | +15 / +7 |
| Trades | 24h sells more than 2x buys (at least 20 sells) | +10 |
| Holders | Top 10 wallets hold more than 50% / 35% of supply | +20 / +10 |
| Holders | Developer wallet holds more than 10% / 5% | +15 / +7 |
| Holders | Fewer than 100 / fewer than 500 holders | +15 / +7 |
| Holders | Holders dropped by more than 3% in 24 hours | +8 |
| Trades | 3 wallets account for more than 50% of recent trade volume | +10 |
| Trades | Developer wallet sold in recent trades | +15 |
| Whales | Whale net selling exceeds 10% of liquidity | +8 |
| Deployer | Deployer sent more than 1% of supply to other wallets in 24 hours | +15 |
| Deployer | Deployer sent more than 0.5% of supply to the pool in 24 hours | +10 |
| Contract | Ownership not renounced | +8 |
| Contract | Proxy contract (upgradeable) | +12 |
| Contract | Risky admin functions: mint, blacklist, fee changes, pause, etc. | +7 per type, max +20 |
On-chain indicators
- Holder trend. Every Transfer event for the token over the last 24 hours (or since the pool was created) is read from the Robinhood Chain RPC. The current balance of every wallet involved is checked, then rewound to find how many wallets started or stopped holding the token over 1, 6, and 24 hours.
- Whales in / out. Net buys and sells are summed per wallet across the last 300 DEX trades. Wallets whose net flow is at least 2% of the sampled volume are listed as accumulating or distributing.
- Deployer wallet. The developer address comes from GeckoTerminal (or the contract owner). Outgoing transfers from that wallet are split into transfers to the pool (likely sells) and to other wallets (often prep for a dump through many wallets).
- Contract check. The contract bytecode is scanned for common admin function selectors, the EIP-1967 proxy slot is checked, and owner() is called to see whether ownership has been renounced.
- Price zones. Swing highs and swing lows from 15-minute candles (tokens under 48 hours old) or 1-hour candles, merged when they sit within 3% of each other. Reference only, not a buy recommendation.
- Slippage. A constant-product (x·y=k) model based on pool reserves. Concentrated-liquidity pools (Uniswap v3/v4) can give different results.
Data sources
- DexScreener: price, liquidity, volume, buy/sell trade counts.
- GeckoTerminal: holder count and distribution, developer wallet, honeypot flag, candles, recent trades, new pools.
- Robinhood Chain RPC (chain ID 4663): contract bytecode, owner, Transfer events, wallet balances.
- Trench Scope AI: summarizes the data and answers questions. It runs on Claude by Anthropic.
Limitations
- A low score is not a guarantee of safety. Fixed rules cannot catch every kind of scam.
- Third-party data can lag by a few minutes or be missing when rate limited. Incomplete sections are flagged in the report.
- A whale may be a bot or an aggregator router rather than one person.
- The AI can be wrong. Key numbers can always be checked against the data cards on the same page.