What Is A Hidden Mint Function In Crypto?

Hidden mints are a type of scam where the developer of a project steals your money by using code buried deep in the smart contract to create a large amount of tokens. While hidden mints are fairly easy to identify after it occurs, they are much more difficult to identify ahead of time by just looking at the contract.

Today, we will walk you through what a hidden mint is, how to identify a hidden mint after it occurs, and most importantly, how to identify a hidden mint before investing. Let’s dive in!

What Does A Hidden Mint Do?

As the name implies, a contract with a hidden mint is hiding a piece of code that can mint new tokens whenever the developer wants to do so. The reason it is a scam is because the “trap is sprung” whenever the developer is ready to steal all of the holder’s money. When the hidden mint is triggered, the project developer will mint a large amount of tokens that equals many times the current total supply and immediately sell them all in one motion.

It is important to understand that a contract is capable of minting as part of its normal operation and is not necessarily a scam. Rather, we are focusing on contracts with a hidden mint whose sole purpose is to steal the holder’s funds by draining the liquidity. Also note that when a hidden mint is triggered, you may think the project is a honeypot because you are unable to sell, but they are very different types of scams.

Hidden Mint Example

Let’s look at an example of a hidden mint after the scammer’s trap has been put into place so you can understand what exactly the hidden mint allows the scammer to do. As you can see from the image below, the project’s team was able to mint and sell a quantity of tokens that was 2,852 times more than the total supply!

How To Identify A Hidden Mint?

Identifying a hidden mint by looking at the contract is quite difficult, which is why Quick Intel’s scanner leverages AI to dig into the contract and compare it to known hidden mint scam signatures from its vast database.

For the contract above, Quick Intel’s AI Scam Forecast not only identified it as having a high likelihood of being a scam but went one step further by providing a 99.61% confidence that it will be a Hidden Mint scam.  As you can see from the below image, the Quick Intel AI determined this was a hidden mint scam 18 hours before the scammers struck!

Note: The Quick Intel AI Scam Forecast is only available to those with the Quick Intel “All Access” tier.  Additionally, the AI is currently only available on the Web and Mobile apps (not in the Discord or Telegram bots).  Click here to learn more about the Quick Intel tiers.