Decoy tokens and honeypot smart contracts are sometimes deployed intentionally within blockchain systems to trap unethical MEV searchers attempting to extract illicit profits.

Quotes that support claims

Then he baited Ethermine with a transaction he thought their MEV bot would gobble up. Sure enough, in March 2021, Ethermine bought the poison tokens and got stuck with them

Worsley created his own decoy cryptocurrency and built a trap into its code: You could buy the token from someone else, but you essentially couldn’t sell it

Related topics

Maximal Extractable Value (MEV)