How to revoke mint authority on a Solana token

A Solana mint has two authorities: one that can create more supply and one that can freeze any holder's tokens. Revoking either is a one-way operation. Done correctly it gives every potential holder a permanent on-chain guarantee that the supply is capped, or that no one can be frozen out of their own balance. Done at the wrong time it permanently breaks your distribution plan. Here is how to do it without breaking anything.

What revoking actually does

Each Solana mint stores up to two authority pubkeys:

Mint authority — the only key the SPL Token program accepts on a MintTo instruction. Set to your wallet at creation. Revoking it sets the field to None; the chain will refuse any future MintTo for this mint, forever. Supply is permanently capped at whatever it was at the moment of revocation.
Freeze authority — the only key the program accepts on a FreezeAccount instruction. Setting it to None permanently strips the ability to freeze any holder. What a freeze authority is, in more detail.

Both revocations are independent. You can revoke just one or both in a single transaction. There is no opposite operation: a revoked authority cannot be reassigned.

Why people do it

The most common reason is signalling. A token with both authorities revoked is, on the chain itself, demonstrably uninflatable and unfreezable. Aggregators, charts, and rug-checkers (including SolKnife's scanner) light up green for revoked authorities; many traders treat an active freeze authority as a soft “don't hold” signal.

The other common reason is integration. Some DEXs, oracles, and wrappers require the mint authority to be None before they will list a token, because their pricing math assumes a fixed supply.

What you almost certainly should NOT do

Revoke the mint authority while you still need to distribute supply — airdrops, vesting tranches, LP seeding. Mint everything first; revoke after.
Revoke the freeze authority on a stablecoin or a regulated token. Issuers need to be able to freeze compromised accounts. For a memecoin or a pure utility token, almost nobody needs this; revoke freely.
Revoke either authority before you've confirmed the mint address is final and the metadata is set correctly. Revoking does not affect metadata, but a wrong metadata URL is also irreversible if you locked metadata at the same time.

The order, in a typical launch

Create the mint.
Set metadata.
Mint your full intended supply to the treasury (and any pre-distribution destinations) via the mint-supply tool.
Seed liquidity, run airdrops, fund vesting contracts — anything that needs a working MintTo.
Revoke mint authority. (Revoke freeze authority too, unless you have a specific regulatory reason to keep it.) Single transaction.

The flow, end to end

Open the revoke-authority tool and connect the wallet that currently holds the authority you want to revoke. SolKnife reads the mint and refuses to proceed if the connected wallet is not the current authority.
Paste the mint address. The tool reads the on-chain state and shows you which authorities currently exist and which would be revoked.
Tick the authorities to revoke (mint, freeze, or both). The in-browser verifier confirms the transaction will set the field to None and nothing else.
Sign. The server self-submits. The revocation is final the moment the transaction confirms.

What it costs

Network fee — a few thousand lamports.
SolKnife fee — a flat lamport amount, operator-set; the current value is on the pricing page.
No rent change.Revocation doesn't close any account; the mint stays where it was, just with one or both authority fields set to None.

How to verify after

Run the rug-checkeron your mint. The authority section should show both as “Revoked” (or whichever you revoked) and the verdict for that signal should flip green. Any explorer (Solscan, Solana Beach) will also show the authority fields as None in the mint account view.

What is a freeze authority on a Solana token? — what freezing means in practice, why holders care
How to check a Solana token for a rug pull — how the rug-checker reads authorities