# How to Detect a Solana Honeypot Token Before Your Bot Buys

> Source: <https://dev.to/mrwizardlyloaf/how-to-detect-a-solana-honeypot-token-before-your-bot-buys-2cdf>
> Published: 2026-06-19 03:24:00+00:00

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.

[RugCheck AI](https://github.com/MrWizardlyLoaf/rugcheck-ai) is a remote MCP server. Point your agent at the endpoint and ask before any buy:

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

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:

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

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

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

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

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.

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
```

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).