From Programming Bugs to Multimillion-Dollar Scams: An Analysis of Trapdoor Tokens on Decentralized Exchanges

We investigate in this work a recently emerging type of scam token called Trapdoor, which has caused the investors hundreds of millions of dollars in the period of 2020-2023. In a nutshell, by embedding logical bugs and/or owner-only features to the smart contract codes, a Trapdoor token allows users to buy but prevent them from selling. We develop the first systematic classification of Trapdoor tokens and a comprehensive list of their programming techniques, accompanied by a detailed analysis on representative scam contracts. We also construct the very first dataset of 1859 manually verified Trapdoor tokens on Uniswap and build effective opcode-based detection tools using popular machine learning classifiers such as Random Forest, XGBoost, and LightGBM, which achieve at least 0.98% accuracies, precisions, recalls, and F1-scores.