Meebits Honeypot

Reported loss Not disclosed
Ethereum
Honeypot

What happened

This record covers an ERC-20 token named "Meebits" with the symbol ⚇, deployed on Ethereum on 3 May 2021 at 0xa057969f…bcfcba, the day Larva Labs introduced its Meebits collection. The real Meebits is a 20,000-item ERC-721 collection at 0x7bd29408…716bc7 that uses the same ⚇ symbol. Every transfer and transferFrom on the copycat runs through a modifier named burnTokenCheck that lets the owner, a hidden _safeOwner address and owner-whitelisted addresses move tokens freely, while other holders can only move amounts below an owner-set _sellAmount that starts at zero; everything else reverts with the misleading message "transfer amount exceeds balance".

Its constructor also emits 21 mint events naming the hard-coded address 0xC352B534…88e56a while crediting those tokens to the owner. De.Fi's REKT database lists this token as an exit scam/honeypot, stating that the contract owner could disable transfers and so stop holders from selling.

How it happened

  1. The constructor sets _owner and _safeOwner to the owner argument and calls _mint 22 times: once for _owner and 21 times for 0xC352B534…88e56a. _mint adds every amount to _balances[_owner] but emits Transfer(address(0), account, amount), so the event log shows mints to 0xC352...e56a that it never receives.
  2. While _owner == _safeOwner, the owner's first outgoing transfer sets _safeOwner = recipient. A Uniswap liquidity add moves the owner's tokens to the pair with transferFrom, which would make the pair _safeOwner.
  3. Transfers sent by _owner or _safeOwner, or sent to _owner, always pass, so buys from the pair go through.
  4. A sale is the router calling transferFrom(holder, pair, amount). For a holder who is not whitelisted, it passes only if amount < _sellAmount, and because the recipient is _safeOwner that holder is then added to _blackAddress. With _sellAmount at its starting value of zero, every sale fails.
  5. Blacklisted or over-threshold senders must satisfy sender == _safeOwner || recipient == _unirouter. A router sale sends to the pair, not the router, so it reverts with "ERC20: transfer amount exceeds balance".
  6. The owner controls the lists through misleadingly named functions: increaseAllowance(address[]) whitelists, addApprove(address[]) blacklists, decreaseAllowance(address) sets _safeOwner, and a transfer from the owner to itself sets _sellAmount. The public _mint lets the owner credit any amount to itself, and the contract has no function to renounce or transfer _owner.

Protocol details

Classification Token / NFT
Protocol Type Exit Scam/Honeypot

Evidence

Same attack technique

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