PumpGuard - A Monitoring Tool I Built and Then Abandoned

I recently spent some time building this thing called PumpGuard. The idea was simple - monitor pump.fun in real-time to detect new token launches, catch rug pulls before they happen, and track whale movements. Basically a monitoring suite for that whole ecosystem.

The Result

I wrote it in Rust because I wanted something performant that could handle the volume of transactions on Solana. The architecture was decent - had modules for token monitoring, rug detection, and whale watching. Built a dashboard with WebSocket updates, integrated Telegram alerts, even set up Prometheus metrics. There’s a Kubernetes operator too, though I never really got that part fully working. The operator definitly needs more work.

The core functionality worked. It could detect new tokens, track liquidity changes, and flag suspicious activity. The rug detector used a scoring system based on LP removal, dev wallet sells, and coordinated dumping patterns. The whale watcher tracked wallets above a certain threshold and alerted on accumulation or dump patterns.

But, I ran into some limitations pretty quick. The Solana RPC endpoints are rate limited unless you pay for premium access, which made real-time monitoring spotty at best. The rate limiting was really frustating. The public RPC would throttle you constantly, especially during high activity periods. Also, detecting rugs in real-time is harder than it sounds - by the time you see the LP being removed, it’s usually too late anyway. False positives were a problem too - not every large sell is a rug, and not every whale movement is meaningful.

I also learned that building a Kubernetes operator is more complex than I initially thought. The CRD definitions and controller logic took way more time than expected, and I never really finished that part properly. The Rust async stuff was fine once I got the hang of it, but the Solana client libraries had their own quirks.

In the end, I decided to move on to other projects. The monitoring tool works for basic use cases, but it’s not production-ready and I don’t have the time or interest to polish it further. There’s value in the codebase if someone wants to fork it, but I’m done with it.

Some things I learned: Rust’s async ecosystem is solid but has a learning curve. Solana’s transaction model makes real-time monitoring tricky. And building tools for crypto markets means dealing with a lot of noise and false signals. The project taught me a lot about both Rust and blockchain monitoring, even if I didn’t finish it. Overall it was a good experiance though.