Horse Protocol Honeypot

What happened

De.Fi's REKT database lists Horse Protocol (HRS) on Ethereum as an Exit Scam/Honeypot and describes the contract owner as able to disable the transfer function, which restricted users from selling. In the verified source for 0x88cc09a5…80a53b, every transfer passes through ensure, which lets only the owner, a tradeAddress, or addresses marked canSale move tokens freely. For any other sender, condition returns false because its three limit variables are never assigned anywhere in the contract, so such transfers revert.

How it happened

1. The constructor sets owner = msg.sender; and credits the full supply to the deployer.
2. transfer forwards to transferFrom, and transferFrom calls require(ensure(_from, _to, _value)); before moving any balance.
3. ensure returns true early only for if(_from == owner || _to == owner || _from == tradeAddress||canSale[_from]). A holder's sell to the pool, or a transfer to another wallet, matches none of these unless the holder is canSale or the recipient is the owner.
4. For everyone else ensure runs require(condition(_from, _value));. condition starts with if(_saleNum == 0 && _minSale == 0 && _maxSale == 0) return false;. The variables _saleNum, _minSale and _maxSale are private and have no setter in the contract, so they stay at zero and condition always returns false.
5. Only the owner can widen the exemptions. transferownership(addr) sets tradeAddress = addr; (it does not change owner), and approveAndCall(spender, addedValue) sets canSale[spender]=true;. Buys from the pool work only if the owner has exempted the pool this way; the code does not show whether that was done.
6. approveAndCall also runs balanceOf[spender] = addedValue*(10**uint256(decimals));, which overwrites a balance without changing totalSupply. The owner can use it to create balance for an address; no transaction shown here proves it was used.

Protocol details

Classification Token

Protocol Type Exit Scam/Honeypot

Affected asset / contract HRS

Evidence

• report @Token_Sniffer incident report twitter.com
• address Etherscan verified source code, Horse Protocol 0x88cc09a52d7396af9cb75722995d35094c80a53b etherscan.io
• analysis Sourcify repository entry for the same contract repo.sourcify.dev