Concept
A cybersecurity company aimed at on-chain defense of smart contract deployment and interactions.
Longer Description
Hacks, exploits, manipulations, and user error lead to a large amount of lost money for the entire crypto ecosystem. While there are a variety of novel versions of all of these, many actions are repeated and thus should be able to be defended against in real-time.
We’ve seen early iterations of this on the user side for things like Harpie and Fire (among others), however it’s likely the scope and scale could be materially increased, creating the next great “cybersecurity for on-chain actions” startups.
Other Thoughts
- Targeting the user is likely where early companies could see success monetizing their product with a freemium model (perhaps tiering by # of wallets or chains supported or transactions/month) however there is also the interesting idea of sitting on top of audits or working with auditors as a B2B2B sale (going audit to protocol). Eventually you would want to sit outside the auditor or absorb this use-case.
- A general principal of “if an exploit happens once, it shouldn’t happen again” is likely table stakes and IMO where this should focus versus trying to do automated detection of entirely novel things that are complex.
- At some point there even could be watchdog component tied to the advanced notice services like Peckshield twitter (or god forbid Sam’s twitter) where if your wallet holds $$ in a protocol or holds a token it would ping you on another device with an alert (there are other services like this). You could go semi-custodial as well so that it lines up transactions but this is scope creep. The key idea is prevention not detection.
Comparable Companies
- Harpie
- Fire
- Cyver
- Audit Firms
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