Not all onchain honeypots are harmful – at least one of them is a veritable force for good. The Cartesi application, named Honeypot, is a white-hat designed to make rollup networks stronger.
Honeypot is an unusual decentralized application in a number of ways. It’s a blockchain security tool first and foremost, but it’s designed to feel more like a game – one with tangible rewards on the line for anyone who can beat the system and obtain the funds locked in its rollup contract. Despite the gamified concept, Honeypot isn’t in the business of entertaining – it’s in the business of fortifying EVM rollups that are built using Cartesi’s tech stack.
Honeypot’s ability to alert rollup operators to potential security holes in their infra has been given a helping hand by the new features Cartesi has added. Chief among these is the Permissionless Refereed Tournaments (PRT) system for fraud-proofs. This is fully permissionless as its name suggests, meaning it’s not reliant on a gated multisig should any interventions be required.
It’s one thing to run audits and diagnostics of blockchain software in the lab. It’s quite another to pen test them in the wild, when everyone from white hats to black hats can have a go. This is where vulnerabilities are likely to be discovered, and if exploited the results could be ruinous. This is why Cartesi’s lavished so much attention on Honeypot which, despite being dubbed a dapp, is much more than just another web3 application.
“Honeypots allow projects to commit their own funds to validate the integrity of their fault proofs before asking others to rely on them,” explains Cartesi Founder Erick de Moura. “It’s a gradual, transparent path toward trustless security that reflects the values this ecosystem was built on.”
Now that it’s running PRT, Honeypot’s fraud-proof system is much more sophisticated. It’s capable of ensuring resistance to Sybil attacks without the need to rely on permissioned validators or resource-intensive hardware. While Honeypot had already proven its worth at testing Cartesi rollups, it’s going to be utilized at scale now as use of rollups ramps up in the coming years.
While the job that rollups do remains broadly consistent – settle transactions on a scalable Layer 2 network and then batch send them to the main chain (e.g. Ethereum) for full settlement – their architecture varies greatly. This is particularly true of Cartesi rollups, which are modular in design. This allows developers to customize parameters such as consensus, data availability, and settlement layers according to their project requirements.
But because each rollup is unique, it’s imperative that security trade-offs aren’t allowed to creep in along the way. This is where Honeypot comes into play, allowing devs to check that the fraud-proof qualities their rollup possesses can’t be gamed in some way, such as through Sybil attacks. Hackers want the honey that’s locked into smart contracts in the form of funds. Honeypot is the armor that ensures they never get so much as a taste.
