Modular blockchain Cartesi has given its PRT Honeypot app an upgrade – and so has Layer 2 dashboard L2BEAT. Following an overhaul by the Cartesi team, Honeypot now sports new features that make it better equipped to perform the task it was designed for: testing the security of rollups.
The Cartesi team has been working intensively on the latest build of Honeypot, which first debuted two years ago on Ethereum. The app effectively gamifies the important task of testing rollup security, giving projects confidence that the funds their native networks hold are safe from hackers.
Honeypot Gets a Little Sweeter
The “PRT” in PRT Honeypot stands for Permissionless Refereed Tournaments, which describes the fraud-proof system the app contains. Essentially, this is a mechanism for ensuring that rollups have resistance to Sybil attacks, which are one of the primary ways in which an attacker might conceivably gain control over a rollup by operating multiple validators.
In any blockchain network, be it a rollup or conventional chain, it’s imperative that validators are distributed in terms of ownership to prevent centralization, maximize fault tolerance, and ensure nefarious actors are unable to unilaterally pull the strings. It’s the primary upgrade the new Honeypot app benefits from and this innovation has helped with the recategorization that L2BEAT has subsequently bestowed.
Cartesi Celebrates App Upgrade
In a tweet celebrating L2BEAT’s assignment of a new category to Honeypot, Cartesi described it as a “key milestone toward decentralization and trustless security, in line with L2BEAT’s standards.” They also elaborated on the new features the app supports in a blog post that summarizes how the app works.
As a gamified app for whitehats, Honeypot tasks participants with attempting to hack the app in an attempt to claim the CTSI prize pot. Developers are invited to check out Honeypot’s GitHub repo and see whether they can find a way to exploit it. Cartesi has also invited the wider community to follow the progress and see whether any of the whitehats taking on the challenge are able to crack the code.
Making Rollups More Reliable
While Honeypot is presented as a fun challenge – a sort of ongoing hackathon – there is serious intent behind the challenge. Making rollups more secure benefits the entire web3 ecosystem, since these lightweight networks are becoming increasingly relied on to scale L1s such as Ethereum. It’s vital that they are highly secure, since any exploit would impair confidence in the entire rollup framework.
As Cartesi explains, Honeypot is designed to solve the challenge of “verifying state transitions in a permissionless, decentralized way that resists Sybil attacks, without requiring massive resources or trust assumptions.” The PRT component is designed to weed out any validators that are acting dishonestly in an attempt to defraud the network.
With Honeypot now serving as a testbed for rollup security, it means Cartesi can rightfully claim to be doing its bit to enhance industry standards when it comes to network design. For as long as Honeypot remains impregnable, it can be taken as evidence that all Cartesi-based rollups are every bit as robust, while also ensuring dispute resolution can be achieved without compromising decentralization.