How Nigerian Developer Adedayo Oreoluwakitan Built A Crypto Honeytoken To Detect Hackers

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Adedayo Oreoluwakitan built a fake wallet with fake money and waited to see if someone would try to steal it.

The wallet had nothing in it worth stealing. No real funds, no real owner, no reason to exist except to be found. So when a transaction hit it at 2:33 p.m. on a Friday and moved a chunk of Sepolia ETH to an address he did not recognise, Oreoluwakitan felt something close to triumph.

That transaction was his.

He had sent it himself, playing the attacker in a controlled test of a trap he had built to see whether it worked. It did. The alert appeared on his dashboard before he had finished refreshing MetaMask.

That is the basic idea behind a honeytoken wallet, and it points to an interesting possibility for crypto security: instead of waiting for an attacker to compromise a valuable wallet, defenders can create something that looks useful, monitor it closely and treat any unexpected interaction as an early warning.

Crypto theft is particularly difficult to deal with because blockchain transactions are designed to be irreversible. Once an attacker gains control of a private key and transfers the assets, there is usually no bank or central fraud department that can simply reverse the transaction. The funds can move through multiple addresses before the victim fully understands what has happened, making investigation and recovery much harder.

That combination of irreversible transactions and delayed detection caught Oreoluwakitan’s attention. Instead of focusing only on how to prevent theft, he wanted to explore how defenders could know when an attacker might have gained access in the first place.

That question pulled him toward an established cybersecurity technique: the honeypot.

A honeypot is a deliberately exposed system designed to attract or detect attackers. A honeytoken uses the same…