Honeypot

A honeypot is a trap: the token looks normal, the price climbs and buys go through, but any attempt to sell fails or loses almost the whole amount to a tax. The chart shows nothing but green candles, because nobody except the creator can sell.

On EVM networks a honeypot usually lives in the contract code: the transfer function blocks sales for everyone outside a whitelist or charges a hidden tax that the creator can raise at any time. On Solana an active freeze authority or some Token-2022 extensions, such as a permanent delegate that can move tokens out of anyone's account, have a similar effect. Alongside the rug pull, the honeypot is the most common memecoin scam.