Immunefi, the growing bug bounty and security services platform for DeFi, recently announced a $24 million Series A funding round. Framework Ventures led the round and Polygon Ventures, Electric Capital, and Samsung Next are among the other investors. This brings the total amount raised to $29.5 million.
Immunefi links web3 projects that require code validation and security with white hat hackers who identify bugs and receive monetary compensation. These awards can sometimes reach $10 million. Most technological businesses, including Apple and Microsoft, are using a similar bug bounty system, but the practice was less popular in web3, in part because hackers are sometimes considerably more incentivized to take the money than to report the flaw, particularly when millions of dollars are on the line.
CEO and founder Mitchell Amador said in a statement: “Open code and directly monetizable exploits have made Web3 the most adversarial software development space in the world. By shifting incentives towards whitehats, Immunefi has already saved billions of dollars of user funds. Projects across crypto are rapidly realizing that it’s better to use Immunefi than publicly begging hackers to return funds or pay a ransom. We’re using this raise to scale our team to meet this massive challenge.”
Immunefi affirms to have awarded $60 million to white hat hackers and to have prevented the loss of more than $25 billion in money. However, bug compensation in crypto must operate differently than in Web 2.0. A $5,000 compensation while $100 million in money could be at stake is pitiful. So Immunefi created a scalable bug bounty standard to motivate projects to pay prizes for major flaws at a rate comparable to 10% of the cash at risk.
Some massive bug bounties, such as the $10 million awarded for a security vulnerability found in Wormhole, a generic cross-chain messaging protocol, and the $6 million awarded for a flaw discovered in Aurora, an Ethereum bridging and scaling solution, differentiate from Apple’s highest regular bug bounty of $2 million.
Interested people can check more details about Immunefi.
