How to Detect a Solana Honeypot Token Before Your Bot Buys

A honeypot is the cleanest way to drain a trading bot on Solana: the token lets you buy, but there is no way to sell. Your agent spends real USDC, receives tokens, and then discovers the exit is welded shut. The position is worth zero and there is nothing to do about it.

Honeypots don’t show up on a price chart — the chart looks great, because everyone can buy and nobody can sell. You only find out at exit. So the check has to happen before the buy.

What makes a Solana token a honeypot

• No live sell route — there is simply no route back to USDC/SOL on any DEX. The most common case.
• Transfer restrictions — Token-2022 extensions like transferHook or pausable let the creator block transfers (and therefore sells).
• Freeze authority — the issuer can freeze your account so the tokens can’t move.

Detect it in one call

RugCheck AI is a remote MCP server. Point your agent at the endpoint and ask before any buy:

simulate_sell("<mint>") -> { sellable: true|false, verdict: "..." }

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A token with no live sell route comes back sellable:false — that’s the honeypot, even when nothing on-chain formally blocks the sell yet. For the full picture in one shot:

scan_token("<mint>") -> { verdict: SAFE|CAUTION|DANGER, safety_score, sellable, risks: [...] }

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Or simulate the whole round-trip at your real size:

simulate_trade("<mint>", 100) -> { buyable, sellable, exit_usd, round_trip_loss_pct }

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A honeypot shows buyable:true, sellable:false. A healthy token shows a small round-trip loss (slippage) and sellable:true.

A real one

I scanned a fresh pump token on 2026-06-17 (re-run to verify): scan_token returned DANGER, score 20 — no live sell route, 100% of supply held by a single wallet, $0 liquidity. An agent that bought it could never get out. That verdict is available before the buy, even though the token is too new to be indexed anywhere else.

Wire it into your agent

It’s a standard Streamable HTTP MCP server. In Cline / Claude Dev, add an mcpServers entry named rugcheck-ai pointing at the endpoint url. In Claude Desktop, run it via npx mcp-remote. In Cursor, add it under Settings, MCP, Streamable HTTP.

Endpoint:

https://web-production-58d585.up.railway.app/mcp

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Then the rule is simple: if sellable is false, do not buy. No install, no API key. Repo and full tool list: github.com/MrWizardlyLoaf/rugcheck-ai (official MCP Registry: io.github.MrWizardlyLoaf/rugcheck-ai).