Flare Honeypot

What happened

FLARE was a BEP-20 token on BNB Smart Chain that borrowed the name of the unrelated Flare Network project. Its _approve function only stores an allowance when the approving wallet is one hard-coded address, the deployer; for every other holder it writes an allowance of 0 while still emitting an Approval event. Because selling through a PancakeSwap-style router requires the router to pull tokens with transferFrom, ordinary holders could buy and hold FLARE but any router sell would revert.

De.Fi's REKT database lists FLARE as an exit scam/honeypot.

How it happened

1. The constructor mints the full supply of 200,000,000,000,000 raw units (4 decimals) to the deployer: _balances[msg.sender] = _totalSupply;.
2. _approve checks if (owner == address(0x6D156858dd42e77B40F4Afd0EA7896FBF2a7dEae)) and only then stores the requested amount. Any other wallet gets _allowances[owner][spender] = 0; followed by emit Approval(owner, spender, 3);, so the approval transaction succeeds but grants nothing.
3. Buying works, because the pair sends tokens with a plain transfer, which has no restriction.
4. Selling through a router calls transferFrom, which then runs _allowances[sender][_msgSender()].sub(amount, "BEP20: transfer amount exceeds allowance"). With a stored allowance of 0, any non-zero sell reverts. Only the hard-coded deployer address can grant the router an allowance, so only that wallet can sell or add liquidity through it.
5. The owner also holds an uncapped mint(uint256 amount) public onlyOwner function. renounceOwnership would remove that mint power, but it would not change the approval check, which compares against a fixed address rather than owner().

Protocol details

Classification Exchange (DEX)

Protocol Type Chain

Affected asset / contract FLARE

Protocol links Website @FlareNetworks

Evidence

• report @Token_Sniffer incident report twitter.com
• transaction BscScan deployment transaction for FLARE bscscan.com
• address BscScan verified contract code, Flare (FLARE) 0xe7d50f007a02fe122f1ec9b17424977afa3ff32d bscscan.com
• analysis Sourcify repository, BEP20Token.sol for chain 56 address 0xe7d50f007a02fe122f1ec9b17424977afa3ff32d repo.sourcify.dev
• analysis Scam explained: BSC no-approval scam (cryptot3ddybear blog) cryptot3ddybear.gitlab.io