Locked, burned or gone?

"Liquidity is locked" is one of the most reassuring sentences in crypto.

It is also one of the vaguest. It can mean three different things, and only one of them cannot be undone.

This is the first part of our series "Safe, they said." Ten sentences that projects use to calm you down, one a week. Here is the first one, taken apart.

What liquidity is, in one paragraph

A token trades against a pool. The pool holds the token on one side and, for example, ETH on the other. Whoever put the pool together received LP tokens in return. LP tokens are the claim on the pool: whoever holds them can take the liquidity out.

So "is the liquidity safe?" is really one question: who holds the LP tokens, and what can they do with them?

Meaning one: locked until a date

The LP tokens sit in a locker contract until a fixed day. Until then, nobody can withdraw them. On that day, the owner can.

That is a real protection, for a limited time. It is also a countdown. A pool that can be pulled in twelve months tells you something about the next twelve months, and nothing about month thirteen.

Meaning two: locked behind a key

A locker is a contract, and many contracts have an owner. If the owner can change the rules, the lock is as strong as that one key.

In May 2026 this went wrong in public. According to the report by rekt.news, the owner key of a liquidity locker from 2021 on BNB Chain changed hands. A day later, more than 1,400 locked pools were emptied, about $7.3 million. Every one of those projects had told its holders, truthfully, that the liquidity was locked.

Nobody had lied. The sentence was simply smaller than it sounded.

Meaning three: burned

The LP tokens are sent to an address nobody has a key for. There is no owner, no end date and no locker contract in between. Nobody can withdraw the pool, including the people who created it.

This cannot be undone, and that is the point. It also means nobody can move the pool somewhere else later. For a token that no team owns, we think that is the right trade.

How to check it for any token

You do not need to trust a website for this, including ours.

1. Find the pool. On Uniswap V2 and its copies, the pool is a contract called the pair.
2. Open the pair on a block explorer and look at the holders of its LP token.
3. Read who holds them. A burn address means burned. A locker contract means locked: now open that locker and look for an owner and an unlock date. A normal wallet means the liquidity can leave today.

One detail matters. A holder list on an explorer can be incomplete. The pair contract itself reports its total supply, and that number cannot be incomplete. Compare the two.

Where SHIBC stands

For SHIBC there is no lock. Every LP token of the pool is at an address that cannot spend it: all of them at the burn address, except 1,000 of the smallest units, which Uniswap itself sends to the zero address when a pool is created.

We measured that again on 11 October 2026, and the steps to repeat it are in our whitepaper, section 3.5.

What we take from it

A sentence like "liquidity is locked" is a summary. The contract is the fact. Our view of how a token should be run is simple: whatever can be made impossible should be made impossible, and whatever stays possible should be visible before it happens.

Next week, part two: "It's audited."