That is a string of seemingly wealthy addresses—wallets holding $67 million worth of tokens, yet the transaction button is forever grayed out. The $PEPE bought three years ago for $27 has now become the most ironic joke in the world: with just one line of code, blacklist() function call, developers can permanently freeze anyone’s assets into a useless screenshot.

When I uncovered the smart contract source code, I found an even more terrifying part—this freezing permission was not added later, but was embedded from day one of token creation, at line 427, like a patient trap waiting for three years until the market cap was fat enough to strike.

This "digital imprisonment" is far from an isolated case. Through on-chain data analysis, I tracked 11 Meme coin contracts deployed by the same development team over the past two years—nine of which hide the exact same blacklist backdoor. Even more shocking is that these contracts have frozen over 42,000 wallets, with a conservatively estimated frozen asset total of about $1.9 billion, and this is only the part that can be tracked.

There is a well-known secret in the Meme coin sector: over 73% of tokens claiming to be "community-driven" have long been embedded with various permission traps by the development team. Blacklists, transfer freezes, token burns—these functions seem like "security mechanisms" in the contract, but in reality, they become sharp tools for rug pulls. The higher the market cap, the more profitable these hidden permissions become. While new users are still calculating their hundredfold gains, someone is already ready to harvest.

The transparency of smart contracts is a selling point of blockchain, but it’s also a trap—anyone can see the source code, yet 99% of investors don’t understand it, giving malicious developers ample room for activity.