The pace of crypto hacks hasn’t slowed down into the dog days of summer, with tens of millions of dollars stolen in August alone. As the crypto community continues in the wake of the expensive exploits, many web3 users are biting their tongues in anticipation of the next major attack.
On August 1, Nomad, a crypto bridging protocol, was hacked for about $190 million. (Crypto-bridges allow users to transfer a token on one chain to another on another blockchain.) In a separate incident just a day later, more than 8,000 Solana-targeted crypto wallets from stripped of their money. Earlier this week, Curve.Financea decentralized financial protocol, was hacked for about $570,000 – nominally compared to the Nomad exploit, yet remarkable.
“We want people to look at our code base and inspect it and find bugs so that it can be improved. We want everyone to work together.” Mudit Gupta of Polygon
As 2022 continues to accumulate expensive exploits, many people in the crypto space are wondering what can be done to prevent these hacks in the future. Sure, they can emphasize the importance of education and protecting your own digital assets, but what else?
The answer may be through projects that use open source software, Mudit Gupta, chief information security officer at layer-2 blockchain Polygon, told londonbusinessblog.com.
The Solana wallet incident happened because of a stupid mistake, Gupta noted. “Anyone can do it; we’re just humans. But if it had been built on open source software, it would have been picked up almost immediately and the product would have been much more secure.”