How to read paid activity on DexScreener: badges, timing, outcomes

The four marks on a token page

DexScreener sells four things and marks each on the token page. Read them in the table below from top to bottom: the lower you go, the more the purchase tells you.

Two details matter. First, boosts are additive: the number is the total of all active packs, and it falls as packs expire, so a token holding a high number for days is being re-boosted. Second, the profile check-mark can be bought for a token by someone who is not the team — the form does not ask for proof of deployment — so "Dex Paid" means someone paid. Pack sizes, durations and prices are covered in the boosts guide and the paid services guide.

Read the spend against the token, not in isolation

A profile is a few hundred dollars; a large boost pack is thousands; an ad campaign more again. Those are small sums for a funded launch and enormous sums for a token capped at a few thousand dollars. The question is never "did they pay?" but "how much, relative to what the token is worth?"

• Spend far above the market cap — a 500x boost on a tiny cap — means the marketing budget is bigger than the token. Either a well-funded launch that has not moved yet, or a wallet running a playbook it has run before.
• Spend in proportion — a profile and a mid-size pack on a token with real liquidity and many makers — is the ordinary pattern of a team promoting something that already trades.
• Spend after the fall — a pack bought while the market cap is dropping — is money spent to keep attention on a token that is losing it. The gap between the paid cap and the current cap is the tell.

DexScreener shows the badge but not the market cap at the moment of purchase. DXT Tools records it as Paid @ on every event, which is what makes this comparison possible after the fact.

The four questions DexScreener does not answer

1. When did it pay? A profile bought in the first minutes after launch is a planned campaign; one bought days later, after volume faded, usually precedes a last push or a relaunch. A boost bought in the busiest hours competes with far more boosted tokens than one bought at night. The feed stamps every event with the minute it was discovered (UTC).
2. At what market cap? "Paid @" is the cap at the moment the payment appeared in the public API. Two boosts at a falling cap and two boosts at a rising cap are opposite stories behind the same badge.
3. What happened afterwards? "Since paid" is the change from the paid cap to now; "ATH after" is the highest cap reached after the payment (from our own minute-by-minute samples and GeckoTerminal candles), with how long after the payment it printed. A token at −90% since paid with a +400% ATH pumped and dumped; one that never moved is a different case.
4. Has this team done it before? The "seen before" check links tokens that share an X handle, Telegram, website, description or image with earlier paid tokens. Same links usually mean the same people; a team that has paid for several tokens this month and abandoned each is the pattern to price in.

Every one of these comes from polling the public DexScreener API continuously and keeping what its "latest" lists throw away. The token check gives the full paid timeline for any contract; the live feed shows the same fields on every new event.

Check a token's paid history →

The flop verdict and the outcome numbers

A flop on DXT Tools has a fixed definition: the token trades at 30% or less of the market cap it paid at, judged no earlier than 30 minutes after the payment — a dip seconds after paying is noise, not a verdict. The badge is live: it appears or disappears with the current numbers, and tokens DexScreener no longer returns get no verdict.

The same data aggregates into the payment-effect tables on Insights and on every guide and chain page: for each kind of payment in the window, Hit +50% and Did 2× (the share of payments after which the cap reached +50% or doubled), Up now (still above the paid cap), Flops, and Best 25% peaked ≥ (the peak gain of the top quarter). Read them as base rates, not predictions, and distrust small counts — a dozen payments is an anecdote.

The table below is the current version of that, all chains, last seven days:

Full Insights: by chain, by pack size, by hour →

Patterns worth recognising

• Profile, then a large pack within the hour — the full marketing stack at launch. The pattern most often followed by a run in our data, and also the one serial launchers copy most faithfully; the seen-before check separates the two.
• A lone profile and nothing else — the cheapest signal. Most tokens that buy a profile never spend again; treat it as "somebody is marketing this" and read the liquidity and holders before anything else.
• Boost stacking — pack after pack as each expires, so the badge never drops. Ask who keeps paying: the team, an agency, or real holders. Rising paid caps mean a working token being kept in Trending; falling paid caps mean a defence.
• A whale boost — one very large pack on a token with no prior paid activity. Usually a single large holder engineering an exit or a run; the alerts by pack size exist for these.
• A boost in the same hour as paid callers on X or Telegram — the coordinated push. The chart looks organic for a few minutes; the timing of the payment against the posts is the giveaway.
• Dex Update instead of Dex Paid — an edit to an existing profile (new banner, new links), which DexScreener publishes through the same list as first payments. Not a new budget; often a rebrand or a CTO rewriting the page.

The routine, in order

Done in this order, each step eliminates the most tokens for the least effort:

1. Identify the marks on the DexScreener page: check-mark, lightning number, Ad label, CTO.
2. Paste the contract into the token check — never search by name — and read the paid timeline: each event, Paid @, Since paid, ATH after, any flop verdict.
3. Compare the spend with the market cap at each payment. Budget bigger than the token? Payments at falling caps?
4. Read the seen-before matches. A team with several abandoned paid tokens is the single strongest negative signal the paid data gives.
5. Only then check the things the badges do not cover — liquidity and its lock or burn, authorities or ownership, top holders, taxes — using the audit links on the DexScreener page.
6. Decide with the base rate in mind: what did this kind of payment do, on this chain, this week? The chain pages (Solana, Robinhood Chain, BNB Chain, Base, Ethereum) carry the per-chain numbers.

For the fields on the rest of the pair page — liquidity, FDV vs market cap, makers, pair age — see How to use DexScreener. For being told the moment a payment lands, see Alerts.

How to use DexScreener, step by step →