African Bitcoin Newbies Shock MIT Bitcoin Hackathon with Second-Place Win
The MIT Bitcoin Hackathon, held annually, brings together participants worldwide for a 30-hour coding sprint, either in-person at MIT or virtually. This year’s event, running April 4–6, featured three tracks: Bitcoin, Lightning & Taproot; Warnet Game; and Decentralized Applications. More details on each track are available on Devpost.
The Underdog Story: How It All Started
It began with a bold mission: BTRUST, a non-profit dedicated to decentralizing Bitcoin software development, with a focus on nurturing talent in the global south while championing the free and open-source Bitcoin ecosystem. Every year, they partner with Chaincode Labs to host an intensive 3-month cohort — a gateway for aspiring developers to dive into Bitcoin open-source software (₿OSS). The 2025 cohort kicked off on January 13th, and among the participants was a group of Bitcoin newbies eager to make their mark. Little did they know that they would take on the world’s best at MIT — and nearly win.
Meet the team: Team Olive
Team Olive comprised a small but mighty trio of newcomers in the Bitcoin development ecosystem, brought together by a shared passion for Bitcoin and a hunger to prove themselves. Leading the charge was John Osezele (Nigeria), who came up with the idea of competing at this year’s edition of the MIT Bitcoin hackathon and rallied the team. Alongside him were Winnie Gitau (Kenya) and Abiodun Awoyemi (Nigeria). With just three months of Bitcoin development experience under their belts from the Btrust ₿OSS cohort in partnership with Chaincode labs, this scrappy crew competed alongside other teams for who will take down the most Bitcoin Core nodes as part of the Track 2 of the hackathon — Warnet Games
BATTLE OF GALEN ERSO
What Is Warnet? The Bitcoin Battleground
Warnet is a project that allows you to simulate the Bitcoin network — simply put, it’s a mini version of the Bitcoin network to test wild ideas and spot weaknesses. Imagine being able to pick which software versions your nodes run, mess with the network’s structure, or even sneak in vulnerabilities to see what happens. It’s all about experimenting with Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer system and watching how it behaves under pressure. Built to run on a Kubernetes cluster, Warnet makes it easy to deploy and manage these simulated networks. At the MIT Bitcoin Hackathon, the Warnet Games track turned this tool into a thrilling challenge: take down as many Bitcoin Core nodes as you can. For Team Olive, it was a chance to learn, explore, and help make Bitcoin tougher — while battling it out for the top spot.
The mission was clear: Attack a network of Bitcoin core nodes running in a private network (via a Kubernetes cluster). The nodes are vulnerable to fully disclosed historical attacks or novel intentional flaws.
Read more about the warnet here.
Let the Games Begin!
The Warnet Games kicked off on April 4, 2025, at 6:00 pm Eastern Time — about 11:00 PM African Time for Team Olive. It started with a quick welcome call on the MIT Bitcoin Expo Discord channel, where hackers were briefed on the rules and guided through the Warnet setup. After which the games officially began, scheduled to last for 30hrs. Ten teams were in the race, each assigned 12 Bitcoin Core nodes in a Warnet network. Every node taken down was worth 10 points, and the goal was simple: rack up the most points by bringing down the most Tanks.
Just 42 minutes in, Team Coffee struck first, taking down a node and setting the pace. But for Team Olive, disaster struck early. Power outage — a classic challenge in many African regions — left Winnie and Abiodun offline for seven grueling hours. With two-thirds of the team sidelined, John, the team lead, stepped up in a big way. Working solo, he managed to take down four nodes, keeping Team Olive in the game and proving their resilience.
The Comeback: Addr Spam and a Race Against Time
By now it was about 9 am the attack continued, this time Team olive had successfully brought down 5 nodes(tanks) and was sitting at 50 points on the warnet leaderboard.
What then followed was a set of persistent attacks, particularly the CAddrman attack, aka ‘Addr Spam’, which targets a vulnerability in older versions of Bitcoin Core (≤ v0.21.1) where the ‘addr’ message handler did not sufficiently limit or sanitize incoming IP address announcements.
Since these older versions of bitcoin allowed unbounded address insertions, you could send millions of fake IP addresses in ‘addr’ messages without being disconnected. And since the address manager was kept in RAM and serialized to disk, it would result in a disk bloat or memory exhaustion. Our attack strategy was using a distributed, multi-threaded, high-volume address spam approach.
In a separate article, I’ll write about these attacks.
One limitation we did not foresee as a team would be system resources because this attack crashed severally on the terminal making us doubt the approach.
The Final Moments
After much struggle, I mean it was coined Battle of Galen Erso for a reason, it was announced on the hackathon discord that it was less than 30 minutes to go!
By now, we were two tanks away from the coveted number one spot, so close we could almost taste victory. But as the popular adage goes, “time waits for no man.” The 30-hour Hackathon wrapped up, and we finished in second place. Team Coffee held onto their lead, clinching the top spot.
Looking Back: An Incredible Run
It was a bittersweet moment for Team Olive. We’d come so close to victory, just two Tanks away from the top spot, but looking back, it was an incredible run. We tackled challenges unique to our region — like a seven-hour power outage that left two of us offline — yet still managed to compete on a global stage and achieve top spots. In the end, we left the MIT Bitcoin Hackathon: Freedom Tech 2025 with our heads held high, knowing we made Africa proud and showed the world that big things can indeed come from small places.
A huge thank you to Btrust Builders for the Bitcoin open-source software (₿OSS) developer program, in partnership with Chaincode Labs. This program was the launchpad that propelled us onto the global stage, giving us the skills and confidence to take on the best at the just-concluded MIT hackathon.
If you’re inspired to start your journey into Bitcoin and Lightning development, we highly recommend checking out the Btrust Pathways. It’s your chance to join a growing community of developers making Bitcoin stronger — and who knows, maybe you’ll be the next to make waves at MIT!
