Kizuna AI Rug Pull
What happened
Kizuna AI (KIZUNA) was an ERC20 token on Ethereum, contract 0x15d5fed8…d7af1e, deployed on 29 August 2023. Its openTrading function creates the Uniswap pool and sends the resulting LP tokens to the owner's own wallet instead of locking or burning them, so the owner can withdraw the pool's ETH at any time. The owner can also add any address to a blacklist that blocks it from sending or receiving, and can raise the post-launch buy and sell taxes to any value; the sell tax already starts at 88% for the first 60 buys.
On 30 August 2023 De.Fi reported that the deployer, 0x1CAFE95d…d54763, removed about 78.5 ETH (about $135,000) of liquidity in many small transactions and moved the funds to EOAs. De.Fi's REKT database records the loss as $134,863; the earlier write-up cites liquidity removal transaction 0xbf29cf83…491c81 and funds transfer 0x7b5aefff…396ad5.
How it happened
- The constructor credits the whole 1,000,000,000 KIZUNA supply to the deployer, who is also the owner and the tax wallet.
- When the owner calls
openTrading, the contract adds its tokens and ETH to a new Uniswap V2 pool withuniswapV2Router.addLiquidityETH{value: address(this).balance}(address(this),balanceOf(address(this)),0,0,owner(),block.timestamp);, so the LP tokens go toowner(). - Buyers face an 88% sell tax until more than 60 buys (
_initialSellTax=88,_reduceSellTaxAt=60), and the owner can later set any final tax withreduceFee, which has no upper limit, or blacklist addresses withmanageList. The owner is exempt from all of these checks. - Because the owner holds the LP tokens, the owner can redeem them for the pool's WETH and KIZUNA at will. De.Fi reports the deployer removed about 78.5 ETH of liquidity in many small transactions and sent it to EOAs, leaving holders with tokens that could no longer be sold for meaningful value.
Protocol details
Evidence
- report De.Fi Security: Rug Pull Alert, $KIZUNA deployer removed ~78.5 ETH from the LP twitter.com
- transaction KIZUNA token creation transaction etherscan.io
- transaction etherscan.io transaction 0x7b5a…6ad5 etherscan.io
- transaction etherscan.io transaction 0xbf29…1c81 etherscan.io
- address Kizuna AI (KIZUNA) verified source code etherscan.io
- address etherscan.io address 0x1CAF…4763 etherscan.io
- analysis Sourcify match for 0x15d5fed8f86732efec2c62e94ae8d434add7af1e on Ethereum repo.sourcify.dev
Build your security review skills
Work through hands-on labs covering real exploit mechanics, review techniques, and defensive patterns.