Johnson may have wanted to hire Longhui Gu.
Gu is co-founder of CertiK, the largest smart contract auditor in the volatile and unpredictable world of cryptocurrencies and the Web3. A friendly and talkative computer science professor at Columbia University, Gu leads a team of more than 250 people to comb through cryptographic code to make sure it’s not riddled with bugs. increase.
CertiK’s work will not prevent you from losing money when cryptocurrencies collapse. Nor can it stop crypto exchanges from using their funds improperly.However, it can help prevent overlooked software problems from causing irreparable damage. , the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and the Ronin Network, which operates the blockchain used in the game. Customers sometimes come to her Gu after losing hundreds of millions of dollars.
“This is the real wild world,” Gu says with a laugh.
Encryption code is much more merciless than traditional software. Silicon Valley engineers usually try to make a program as bug-free as possible before shipping it, but if problems or bugs are found later, the code can be updated.
For many crypto projects, that’s not possible. They are executed using smart contracts (computer code that manages transactions). (Suppose we want to pay an artist 1 ETH for an NFT. When the money arrives in the artist’s wallet, we can code a smart contract to automatically send the NFT tokens). Blockchain, cannot be updated. By the time you find the bug, it’s too late. The whole point of blockchain is that what is written cannot be changed. Worse, since the code hosted on the blockchain is public, malicious hackers can inspect it in their spare time, looking for exploitable mistakes.
The number of hacks is dizzying and they are making huge profits. Earlier last year, the Wormhole Network stole over $320 million in crypto assets. Ronin Network has since lost over $600 million in cryptocurrency.
