Blockchain programming mistakes can result in the loss of $100 million in an instant. Rongy Gu and his company CertiK are trying to help.
The work of CertiK will not save you from losing money in the event of a cryptocurrency failure. It will also not prevent the crypto exchange from misusing your funds. But it can help prevent irreparable damage from an overlooked software problem. The company's clients include some of the biggest players in crypto, such as the Bored Ape Yacht Club and the Ronin Network, which runs on the blockchain used in games. Clients sometimes come to Gu after losing hundreds of millions in the hope that he can make sure this doesn't happen again.
“It’s really a wild world,” Gu laughs.
Cryptocode is much more unforgiving than traditional software. Silicon Valley engineers usually try to make their software as bug-free as possible before releasing it, but if a problem or bug is discovered later, the code can be updated.
This is not possible for many crypto projects. They work with smart contracts, the computer code that manages transactions. (Let's say you want to pay an artist 1 ETH for an NFT - the smart contract can be coded to automatically send you an NFT token when the money goes into the artist's wallet.) This is when the smart contract code is active on the blockchain. , you cannot update it. If you find a mistake, it's already too late. The essence of blockchains is that you cannot change the material on which they are written. To make matters worse, the code hosted on the blockchain is public, allowing black hat hackers to freely examine it and look for flaws to exploit.
The sheer number of hackers is staggering and they are extremely lucrative. At the beginning of last year, the Wormhole network stole more than $320 million worth of cryptocurrencies. The Ronin network then lost over $600 million worth of cryptocurrencies.