Honeypot Tokens Explained: Why You Can Buy but Never Sell

A honeypot is a contract engineered so buying works and selling does not. Victims see green candles and a working buy button; the sell button fails with vague errors or silently does nothing.

The mechanics

The contract inspects who is calling transfer. If the caller is a normal trader selling, the call reverts or burns tokens; if it is the owner or a whitelisted wallet moving their own bags out, it succeeds. Common implementations gate sells behind a flag the owner toggles, charge 100% tax on sellers, or require a cooldown that never opens.

Why wallets do not warn you

Your wallet confirms transactions, not outcomes. It has no idea the swap you signed will be the last one the contract accepts. Nothing in your wallet's UI distinguishes a tradable token from a trap.

Simulation is the only reliable detector

You cannot read bytecode your way out of obfuscated honeypots reliably — modern ones hide logic behind proxies and external calls. What works is simulating both directions: attempt a buy and a subsequent sell from an unrelated wallet. If the sell leg fails, everything else is decoration. That simulation runs automatically on every RugRadar scan and is the single highest-weighted finding.

Near-honeypots

Treat 'technically sellable' with suspicion too: contracts where sells work only below a size threshold, or after a fee the owner can raise to 100%, are honeypots with extra steps. Per-wallet slippage modification is the tell.

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