Someone drops a contract address in a group chat. The chart looks alive. The site looks polished. Your wallet is one approve away from finding out whether you can sell.
“Is this safe?” is the wrong question if you expect a guarantee. The useful question is: what does a cheap, automated pass/fail look like before I size a position?
What a Risk Scorecard Should Include
- Honeypot / sell simulation — can a buy be sold in a simulator, and at what tax?
- Liquidity depth — can you exit without nuking the pool?
- Holder concentration — can one wallet dump the float?
- Pool age & venue diversity — brand-new single-DEX pools are a different animal than multi-venue majors
- Basic ERC-20 sanity — is it even a token contract?
None of that replaces reading the source, understanding the team, or refusing meme coins entirely. It does replace “I glanced at the chart.”
$1 contract scan (Base)
Contract risk scanner returns a 0–100 risk score, a SAFE / CAUTION / AVOID-style verdict, and a check table (honeypot, taxes, liquidity, holders). Humans pay $1 with a card; agents call the same /v1/contract-scan endpoint over x402 when they encounter an unknown token mid-flow.
How Agents Change the Workflow
A trading agent cannot open ten browser tabs. It can, however, hit a paid endpoint, get a structured JSON risk object, and decide whether to proceed. That is why this utility is dual-rail: card for people, HTTP 402 for machines.
Limits You Should Expect
Simulators lie sometimes. Indexers lag. LP wallets look like whales. A green check is not insurance. Treat automated scans as a filter that removes the obvious garbage so you can spend attention on what remains.
Related Developer Utility
If you already have calldata and need to know what function it calls, use the ABI decoder — also $1 per call.
The Takeaway
Safety is a stack of imperfect signals. Automate the cheap ones. Start with a $1 scan, and keep the rest of the crypto utilities handy for agents and humans alike.