Mina Protocol Rug Pull

Reported loss $106K
Rugpull

What happened

This "Mina Protocol" (MINA) token is a BEP-20 copy on BNB Chain at 0xDC2cE292…55bc39 that borrows the name of the unrelated Mina Protocol blockchain; it was deployed on 24 October 2023 by 0x1EC5a461…76f7F6. Its verified source hides a balance override: before every transfer, _transfer replaces the sender's balance with a number returned by an external contract whose address was passed in at deployment and never shown in the code. That contract can set any wallet's balance to zero, so sells revert, or give a chosen wallet more tokens than the 1,000,000,000 total supply.

Ownership was renounced (the on-chain owner is the zero address), but the override is not an owner function, so renouncing did not remove it. On 25 October 2023 PeckShield reported that 0x0920baB9…2da44A swapped 1,000,000,000,000,000 MINA for about 474.26 BNB (about $107.5K), taking the price to zero; the record lists the loss as $106,395 (474.25 WBNB), with the proceeds routed through several addresses to Binance.

How it happened

  1. At deployment the constructor takes a8cik10 and stores it as an address: IWFIpAVOYnOUOnOIEopbM = (address(uint160(a8cik10)));. The contract at that address is not part of the verified source.
  2. Every transfer and transferFrom runs _transfer, which first overwrites the sender's balance with that contract's answer: _balance[xlzsakutfrom] = _4b5600ccc(xlzsakutfrom, amount, _balance[xlzsakutfrom]);.
  3. If the hidden contract returns less than the amount for a holder, the next line, require(_balance[xlzsakutfrom] >= amount, ...), reverts, so that holder cannot sell into the pool.
  4. If it returns a huge number for a chosen wallet, that wallet can transfer far more than _totalSupply (fixed at 1000000000 * 10**_decimals) without any mint call or Transfer event from the zero address.
  5. PeckShield reported that 0x0920baB9…2da44A sold 1,000,000,000,000,000 MINA, a quantity a million times the stated supply, for about 474.26 BNB, emptying the PancakeSwap pool.

Protocol details

Classification Token
Protocol Type Exit Scam/Rugpull
Affected asset / contract MINA

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