AERION Honeypot

Reported loss Not disclosed
BNB Chain
Honeypot

What happened

AERION (AERION) is a BNB Chain token deployed on 16 May 2021 at 0xa5f495b0…e6817c by 0x422b6ab5…5e696E, which is still its owner. Its balance logic, hidden inside the Ownable base contract, stores the recipient of the very first token transfer in a private variable _xowner and from then on reverts every transfer to that address with "Recipient not found.". When the first transfer is the deployer's liquidity deposit, _xowner is the PancakeSwap pair, so holders can buy, because tokens leave the pair, but can never sell, because selling means sending tokens to the pair.

No function can change _xowner, so the block does not depend on any later owner action, and renouncing ownership would not remove it. De.Fi's REKT database lists AERION as an exit scam/honeypot, stating that holders were restricted from selling their tokens.

How it happened

  1. The constructor calls initOwner, which makes the deployer _owner and credits it with the full supply of 1,000,000,000,000 AERION (9 decimals).
  2. Every transfer and transferFrom calls setWallets(sender, recipient, amount). While _xowner is still the zero address, the first transfer from a non-zero sender stores its recipient as _xowner.
  3. Every later transfer runs require(recipient != _xowner, "Recipient not found."). If the deployer's first transfer was the liquidity deposit, _xowner is the pair.
  4. Purchases move tokens out of the pair, so they pass. A holder's sale routes tokens into the pair, so it reverts, and the revert message gives no hint that the pair is blocked.
  5. The stored address can only be read by the owner through getBurnAddress(), and no function writes _xowner again, so the block is permanent once set.

Protocol details

Classification Token
Protocol Type Exit Scam/Honeypot
Affected asset / contract AERION

Evidence

Same attack technique

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