What is actually being locked, how a lock differs from a burn, and why "liquidity locked" without a date is half an answer.
When a token trades on a decentralised exchange, someone has deposited a pair of assets — the token and something else, ETH or USDC or BNB — into a pool. In return they received LP tokens: a receipt proving how much of that pool belongs to them. Whoever holds the receipt can hand it back and take their share of the pool out.
So the thing you are checking is not the pool. It is who holds the receipts, and whether they can still use them. Everything below is about that one question.
The pool has its own contract address — the pair address — and the LP tokens for it have holders, exactly like any other token. Reading that holder list tells you where the receipts sit: in a deployer's wallet, spread across many addresses, sent to a burn address, or held by a locker contract.
That last case is what "locked" normally means. A locker is a contract that takes the LP tokens and refuses to give them back until a date written into it has passed. Not to the team, not to anyone.
Sending LP tokens to a burn address — an address nobody holds the key to — removes them from circulation permanently. Nothing comes back out, ever. There is no date and no expiry, because there is nothing left to release.
A lock is temporary by construction. It has a start, an end, and a contract in between. Both are described as "liquidity locked" in project communications, and they are different facts with different futures.
A lock without a term is not a described lock. "Liquidity locked ✅" says the receipts are in a locker; it does not say until when. A lock expiring next Tuesday and a lock expiring in two years are both accurately called locked, and they describe entirely different situations.
When a lock expires, the LP tokens return to whoever deposited them, and the position is exactly what it was before the lock existed. Nothing is announced. The date is public and readable, which is why it is worth reading rather than taking on trust.
It is rarely all or nothing. A project may lock most of the LP tokens and leave some out, or lock through several contracts with different dates. So the honest form of the answer is a percentage and a set of dates, not a tick.
Our free check reports the locked share as a number for that reason, and says "no data" when the source cannot see the pool rather than guessing at zero. A missing answer and a zero are different things, and we do not round one into the other.
A lock removes one specific ability for one specific period: the ability to withdraw the pooled assets. It says nothing about who the team is, whether the contract has other powers, or what happens the day after it expires.
And as with everything else in a mechanical check, it describes what is possible, not what is intended. A project with unlocked liquidity has not done anything — it has kept an option. What to make of that is your call, and it depends on things the chain does not record.
The free check reports the locked share and the date it read it. Paste a contract address: