Shiba King Honeypot

What happened

Shiba King (KING) is a BNB Chain reflection token deployed on 19 June 2021 at 0x47b63892…155e56 by 0x7fFd572A…9Ca971. Its internal _transfer function requires that every transfer delivers tokens to the wallet that signed the transaction, unless the owner signed it. Buying from the PancakeSwap pair passes that check, but a sale sends tokens to the pair, which never signs a transaction, so every sale by an ordinary holder reverts.

De.Fi's REKT database lists Shiba King as a honeypot; no loss figure is recorded.

How it happened

1. The constructor gives the deployer the whole supply of 3 quadrillion KING (9 decimals), makes the deployer owner, and creates the PancakeSwap KING/WBNB pair.
2. _transfer contains require(tx.origin == to || tx.origin == owner());, so a transfer succeeds only if the recipient is the account that started the transaction, or the owner started it.
3. On a buy, the pair sends KING to the buyer, who is tx.origin, so buys go through.
4. On a sale, the router moves KING from the seller to the pair; the pair is not tx.origin, so the call reverts. Sending KING to another wallet fails the same way.
5. Only transactions signed by the owner pass the check, so only the owner can sell into the pair. owner() now returns the zero address; the Ownable code includes lock/unlock, which let a previous owner reclaim ownership after a timer, and the source alone does not show whether ownership was renounced or locked.
6. The owner can also call setTaxFeePercent and setliquidityFeePercent, which have no upper limit.

Protocol details

Classification Token

Protocol Type Exit Scam/Honeypot

Affected asset / contract KING

Evidence

• report Report tokensniffer.com
• transaction Shiba King contract creation transaction bscscan.com
• address Shiba King (KING) verified contract code on BscScan bscscan.com
• analysis Sourcify match for 0x47b6389236c7be4e181db810aaf8b08688155e56 on BNB Chain repo.sourcify.dev