What is a honeypot token?

A honeypot is one of the most common ways new traders lose money on a decentralized exchange. The token looks normal — it has a chart, liquidity and buyers — but its contract contains logic that quietly prevents most wallets from selling. You can send money in, yet every attempt to send it back out reverts, gets taxed to nothing, or is silently blocked.

The trap is usually written into the token's transfer function. A contract might only allow transfers from a hidden whitelist, raise the sell tax to an extreme value once liquidity is added, or pause selling entirely while keeping buys open. Because the buy side works perfectly, the scam can run for hours or days, pulling in victims before anyone realizes the exit is closed.

The only reliable way to know is to simulate an actual sell against the live contract rather than trust its source code, which may be unverified or deliberately misleading. Sally's honeypot checker does exactly that on Base and BNB Smart Chain: it dry-runs a buy and a sell through real liquidity and reports whether the round trip succeeds, so you can spot the trap before committing real funds.