The pace of crypto hacks hasn’t slowed in the dog days of summer, with tens of millions of dollars stolen in August alone. As the crypto community carries on in the wake of the expensive exploits, many web3 users are biting their tongue waiting for the next big one to strike.
On August 1, Nomad, a crypto bridging protocol, was hacked for about $190 million. (Crypto bridges allow users to transfer one token on one chain into another on a different blockchain.) In a separate incident, just a day later, over 8,000 Solana-focused crypto wallets were drained of their funds. Earlier this week, Curve.Finance, a decentralized finance protocol, was hacked for about $570,000 — nominal compared to the Nomad exploit but noteworthy nonetheless.
“We want people to look at our code base and inspect it and find bugs in it so it can be improved. We want everyone to collaborate together.” Polygon's Mudit Gupta
As 2022 continues to rack up 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 might be through projects employing open source software, Mudit Gupta, chief information security officer at layer-2 blockchain Polygon, told TechCrunch.
The Solana wallet incident happened because of a silly mistake, Gupta noted. “Anyone can do it; we’re just humans. But if it was built on open source software it would have been caught almost immediately and the product would have been much safer.”