Lesson 05 · Unit 5 · Solana
Locked liquidity
Liquidity is the money on the other side of your exit. If the person who put it there can take it back, your exit is on loan.
When someone creates a pool they deposit both sides — say SOL and the token — and receive LP tokens, a receipt for that deposit. Handing the receipt back withdraws the money. So the real question about liquidity is never "how much is in the pool" but "who holds the receipt, and what can they do with it".
For a standard pool the answer is one of three. Burned: the receipt was sent to an address nobody controls, so the money can never come out — the strongest promise on chain, because it cannot be renegotiated. Locked: the receipt sits in a contract until a date, which is a real promise with an expiry you should look up. Unlocked: the deployer is holding the receipt right now, and your exit exists at their convenience. (Newer concentrated-liquidity pools issue the position as an NFT instead of a fungible receipt: a different object, the same three questions.)
State
What it means
Exit
Burned
LP tokens destroyed
Permanent
Locked
LP tokens time-locked
Until the unlock date
Unlocked
Deployer holds the LP
Whenever they choose
Locked share of liquidity
34% — Mostly free to leave
Mostly free to leave
Partly secured
Secured
Where this goes next
A lock has an expiry, and a pool has a limit. What the pool can actually pay you, and what a drained pool looks like, come later.