AMA Recap: CRYPTO MINERS X CERTIK

CertiK is a pioneer in blockchain security, utilizing best-in-class Formal Verification and AI technology to secure and monitor blockchains, smart contracts, and Web3 apps. CertiK is a pioneer in blockchain security, leveraging best-in-class AI technology to protect and monitor blockchain protocols and smart contracts. Founded in 2018, CertiK’s mission is to secure the web3 world. CertiK applies cutting-edge innovations from academia to enterprise, enabling mission-critical applications to scale with safety and correctness. One of the fastest-growing and most trusted companies in blockchain security, CertiK is a true market leader. To date, CertiK has worked with over 3,700 Enterprise clients, secured over $310 billion worth of digital assets, and has detected over 60,000 vulnerabilities in blockchain code. Their clients include leading projects such as Aave, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, Terra, Yearn, and Chiliz. CertiK is backed by Insight, Partners, Sequoia, Tiger Global, Coatue Management, Lightspeed, Advent International, SoftBank, Hillhouse Capital, Goldman Sachs, Coinbase Ventures, Binance, Shunwei Capital, IDG Capital, Wing, Legend Star, Danhua Capital and other investors.

We hosted an AMA session with Certik on 19th August.

Mr. Ramsy was the host from Crypto Miners and Mr. Chace was the guest. He shared delightful knowledge and unique features of Certik.
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Segment 1️⃣: Introduction

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Hello everyone 👋 Welcome to Our AMA session With CertiK

To help us learn more about CertiK, We are lucky to be joined By Mr. Chace

Hello Chase👋

Chace:
👋

Thanks for having me!

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Welcome here Mate

Thanks for bringing Us CertiK ❤️

Chace:
For sure! We’re always happy to share more about what we’re doing

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
First of all Can you introduce yourself to the community?

Chace:
For sure! Thanks for having me. So I am Chace, I’m the social media marketing manager for CertiK. I have been with CertiK for about a year and a half now. Started as a Community Manager and have sort of worked my way up. Been in the crypto space since ’17 so it was always my dream to work in the industry, so here i am!

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Nice to meet you Chase 🤩

Chace:
🤝

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
So I’m pretty sure that our Community is Waiting for learn more about CertiK ✌️

So let’s get started if you’re ready!!

Chace:
lets do it!

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
1)Please Make a concise and brief introduction about CertiK.
How it is playing its role in Auditing and securing crypto world?

Chace:
Awesome, yea so at a high-level, CertiK is a pioneer in blockchain security. Leveraging best-in-class AI technology to protect and monitor blockchain protocols and smart contracts.

We were founded in 2018 by professors from Yale University and Columbia University with the mission to secure the web3 world. We provide auditing services for smart contracts, we provide on-chain monitoring and insights, KYC services, Bug Bounties, penetration testing, and more.

We have serviced over 3,000 projects and protocols with over $350B of assets secured.

You can always learn more at CertiK.com 🙂

as for the How it is playing its role in Auditing and securing crypto world? — As I mentioned before, by servicing over 3,000 projects and protocols with over $350B of assets secured, I think it is a good start!

Outside of auditing for projects, a big part of what we believe and try to do is be transparent with users with what we see as experts in the space and provide plenty of educational content for users. On https://www.certik.com/resources you can find a ton of information on what you can do to stay safe in the crypto space and just learn general crypto knowledge. We have blogs on red flags to look out for in a project, common scams, how to secure private keys, and more.

With our mission statement of “Securing the Web3 World”, we know that is no easy task. So we are always looking for new tools and services to find better ways to do this. We recently went through another funding round with investments from Goldman Sachs and other big players that gives us the funds and opportunities to do this.

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Thanks Chase for this great start about CertiK 👍

Now let’s see our second question from this segment

2.What are the features of CertiK that makes it superior and special as compared to its competitors?

Chace:
hmm, I credit it largely to who we hire. We get emails for each new hire and the backgrounds and knowledge of the engineers and everyone else we bring on impresses me each time. I truly do think we have some of the brightest minds in the crypto space here at CertiK.

Another reason is that we are always looking for ways to improve and build newer or better products. We’re never really satisfied with what we have. We give a lot of freedom to employees and encourage them to think outside the box and come up with cool new tools or anything else that is useful.

We are creating a full security suite with all of our different products and services from the code audit, to on-chain monitoring, to KYC, etc.

While traditional testing approaches merely attempt to detect bugs, the CertiK Software provides mathematical proofs that blockchain ecosystems are bug-free. That is one of the main reasons that CertiK is recommended over competitors.

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
3. How an audit is done in CertiK on which basis? How a common user can understand the audit results for their funds safety?

Chace:
Our audit reports are custom, thorough, and transparent. Our industry-leading audit methodology and tooling includes a review of the projects code’s logic, with a mathematical approach to ensure the program works as intended.

The report will contain the details of any identified vulnerabilities and classify them by severity (Critical, Major, Medium, Low, and Informational), along with suggested remediations. We show whether a project implemented our suggestions very clearly on the project page by listing how many vulnerabilities were found and how many were resolved. So this is an easy way for a user to understand the results of the audit without needing to know anything about contracts or coding. They can clearly see that we found 10 vulnerabilities and the project only fixed 3 of them for example.

An important thing to do for users is to ASK QUESTIONS. If a project you like has unresolved issues from an audit, it is important to ask WHY they left them unresolved.

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Sounds good 👍

Now let’s move to our last question from this segment

4. What is CertiK’s KYC and how does it help investors?

Chace:
Yea so our KYC service is one of our newer services which we are very excited about

As the leader in the crypto security space, CertiK’s focus has always been to secure the cyber world and to protect crypto projects and USERS.

The rise of anonymous teams has been an emerging trend throughout the past few years, and has enabled high-risk behaviors by individuals who hide behind the veil of anonymity by conducting rug pulls, scams, etc. CertiK KYC is designed to deanonymize project teams and create greater accountability through a rigorous vetting process.

Our KYC is like an audit of the team. The process has two parts to it, one is that we do an enhanced background check on all the project’s team members to make sure that they haven’t been involved in past scams rugs etc.

The other part is holding Project accountable if they do rug or have fraudulent activity that hurts investors.

We have a team of professional investigators that previously worked for the fbi, military intelligence, etc and have close contacts with law enforcement so if a project does rug, we quickly report their info and work to bring them to Justice.

It is important to note that not all projects can pass and complete CertiK’s KYC. I think only roughly 20% have actually passed so far. So the CertiK KYC badge does carry some weight to it

If you are interested to see what happens to projects that are KYC’ed and still rug pull or scam investors, you can check out this blog: https://www.certik.com/resources/blog/2C7VH0c2mJicaqtZIhhmHO-certiks-response-to-kyc-rugs-zoro-inu

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Thanks Chase for this well detailed introduction about CertiK:)

And that’s the wrap up of our the first part of the AMA session ✅

Chace:
🙌

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Let’s now proceed to our Twitter Questions section

i hope you’re ready for that!!

Chace:
Lets do it!

Twitter is where I spend most of my time, so i’ve seen seen everything you could throw at me 😆

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
That’s cool 😃

Segment 2️⃣: Twitter Questions

1: Certik is the Best-in-class tech from academia to enterprise, ensuring accuracy & security of your blockchain project. What is your secret why many project choose Certik as their auditing platform?

Chace:
Good question, But I mean you already said it! Lol “ Best-in-class tech from academia to enterprise, ensuring accuracy & security of your blockchain project.” 😃

But other than that, we have a strong foundation and we are built on academic principles. I’ve already sort of touched on what sets us apart from competitors above, but I think being the industry leader has some weight to it and users tend to trust that more so over another random auditing firm. And as I mentioned before, the tooling we have, the suite of services, and the approach we take to auditing (using formal verification AND humans) to ensure that we find all bugs.

Also the level of transparency with the community is another thing that helps.

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
2: CertiK is one of the best auditors till date and having over 3,157 Projects Listed on their platform. So, if we wish to list a project on CertiK for audit, what is the requirement for the project and how much fees do you take for it?

Chace:
Good question! Yea so on CertiK.com we have the Security Leaderboard which is where all of our audits, KYC, and Skynet clients go so that users can verify the legitimacy. Lately we have been seeing a few projects lie and claim they have a CertiK audit, but do not. So it is important to always check our website to verify.

We do have a fee for audits because we do have to pay our employees lol. But for audits, each quote is custom to the project and is based on the length and complexity of the code. So we often get asked “how much” but its something we cant answer until we have an engineer go through the code and make a custom quote. No two projects are the same for the most part.

For audits we accept all projects from large to small and are happy to work with everyone. We highly encourage projects to include our other services, but it is not required.

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
3: I realized there are Careers at CertiK and you are hiring peoples to your team. Can you tell me how can I join CertiK? What are the available positions?

Chace:
Yea we are always looking for new team members to join! At certik.com/company/careers you can see a full list of open positions. I think there are around 40 listed there now. You can also learn more about life at CertiK, our culture, etc.

For me, CertiK provided a great opportunity to get my foot in the door in web3. Previously I was working at an Anti-Money Laundering firm but had been in crypto since 2017 and I always wanted to work in the industry. So whether it’s CertiK or not, just getting your foot in the door and getting that first job in web3 is important. Many options and opportunities will come after that.

But yea i would recommend heading there, scrolling through, see what catches your eye/what you would think would be a good fit, and apply! What is there to lose?

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
4:Skynet is technologies built by CertiK’s team of security researchers. For my curiosity, please explain more about Skynet? How this work? And How can we activate Skynet?

Here is our last question from Twitter

Chace:
So skynet is what we typically get asked about the most. And if you are a Terminator fan, no there is no connection 😂

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Haha 😅

Chace:
But Skynet is essentially a 24/7 surveillance for smart contracts. A good way to put it is that an audit is a snapshot of a code, but Skynet is a camera in the corner of the room that actively monitors them. It can identify any anomalies, for example it has active flash loan detection and DEX liquidity monitoring. Skynet is based on a yearly subscription which is very affordable for projects. It is a great addition to a smart contract audit.

Projects that have Skynet get a Trust Score, which is a weighted index of “signals” we’ve develop at CertiK. There are dozens of signals that include everything from software quality and centralization risk — to Community sentiment and market strength. The Security Score is a weighted index of our security signals and our “Market and Community” score is a weighted index of our non-security signals.

All of this can be found on the Security Leaderboard where we host all of our clients’ info. This includes audit reports, trust score, Skynet information, and more. It really is a great place to do research for a lot of cool projects. It will show liquidity, social sentiment, price analysis, performance, top holders, etc.

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
That’s the wind up of our twitter segment

Chace:
Some good questions!

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Thanks for the valuable answers

Now Moving on to our last segment — Live Q&A

Shall we Chase?

Chace:
Lets do it!

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
here we go

Segment 3️⃣: Live QnA
(In this segment group was opened for 60 seconds and Miners sent hundreds of questions. Guest choose some best to answer)

1) Esra:
KYC For Project Teams Is More Important Than Ever
Can you tell us more about CertiK KYC?
How can I request a quote?

Chace:
Yea for sure! First, you can find more and request a quote here: https://www.certik.com/products/kyc

While a single ID check can suffice when authorizing someone to open a bank account, it is certainly not enough to entrust a crypto team with millions of dollars. The objective of the CertiK KYC is to thoroughly verify the team behind the project across many avenues unique to Web3, and create a level of transparency and accountability that is proportional to the amount of funds at stake.

CertiK has hired a team of law enforcement investigators and military intelligence analysts to create a unique, thorough investigation and verification process. Their goal is to reach and maintain the highest level of due diligence, and carry out a complete verification, not only of the code and the on-chain data of the project, but also of the team members. In order to effectively vet the best crypto teams, CertiK has adapted the background investigation methodology, which is traditionally used to grant security clearances to law enforcement agents and military officers.

Thanks to its highest level of verification and investigation on the market, CertiK has been able to detect professional “KYC for hire” actors, hidden team members, fake documents, rogue developers, devs who concealed the fact that they participated in prior fraudulent projects or rugpulls, and multiple malicious teams whose sole intent was to run a fake project in order to collect cash for fraudulent gain. This ability to detect malicious teams very early brings great value, because it allows institutions and investors to save both time and money, and focus their attention on legitimate projects and teams.

This is taken from https://www.certik.com/resources/blog/1u6A5jNfHGoP5r7kpjtju1-what-is-the-difference-between-a-regular-kyc-and-certiks-kyc cause i cant type all of this quickly 😂

2) Can You please tell me name of Certix CEO?

Chace:
CertiK’s CEO is Ronghui Gu. He is a Tang Family Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. You can find more on our website https://www.certik.com/company/about

3) CHUKKY:
Hello Chase,
What are the benefits of Certik to me as a regular web3 user?

Chace:
To find safe projects and give you the resources you need to navigate web3 securely. Whether that be through our educational content, audit results, etc. CertiK.com provides a lot of resources for what users need to DYOR. Find a cool project? Check for an audit and see how secure it is. Curious on the common scams to look out for? check out our blog on the most common scams and what to look for. Curious about red flags in a project? check out our blog on the top 5 red flags to look for before investing in a project

4) Alex HiRa:
How can users join this project? Do you have a local community channel?
1, YouTube channel
2, website
3, Instagram
4, Discord
5, Twitter
6, others
From which can we get the latest update of your project?

Chace:
We do! We have 3 twitters, @CertiK @CertiKCommunity and @CertiKAlert. All have different purposes and i’d check them all out! Our youtube is https://www.youtube.com/c/CertiKCommunity. We also have a Telegram and discord.

Discord is the best place to ask questions, chat with others, and get support from the team. We have weekly discussions around cool topics including security so i would definitely join and check it out https://marketing.certik.com/CertiKDiscordCM

5) Linus Oduh:
Did you consider community feedback requests during the creation of @CertiK in order to expand on fresh ideas for the project?

Chace:
I will answer this by saying Community feedback is very important to us and definitely impacts how we move forward. We are here to support users and make them feel safer, so their feedback and input is very important to us.

6) I read CertiK audited a total of over 3700 projects to date and reported on many incidents. Can you tell us what types of incidents that Certik encounter? And how di you address this incidents?

Chace:
Yea! So we do quarterly and yearly reports on the trends we see in the space. these can be found at https://www.certik.com/resources such as this one https://www.certik.com/resources/blog/7fuXtbfo4CXEXcwy5Pqijp-hack3d-the-web3-security-quarterly-report-q2-2022

What we found in 2021 is that centralization issues were the most common exploit vector. So we have been trying to highlight this to communities and projects and explain the importance of decentralization. But in audits we see all types of stuff. For most major attacks/exploits, we also host full details in our blogs where users can read what happened

*This segment ends here*

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Anyway Thankyou so much Chace For your valuable answers and information about CertiK ❤️

It Was Pleasure Hosting An Ama With You

Time To Conclude Our AMA Section

Is there anything else you would like to share or you want us to know?

Chace:
It was a pleasure being here! I wanna thank you guys for hosting, it was fun! Be sure to follow Crypto Miners and CertiK on Twitter 🙂

If you wanna learn more about CertiK, ask more questions, get support, or just chat, join our discord!
https://marketing.certik.com/CertiKDiscordCM

Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Once Again Thanks you so much Chace for spending time with our community

Have a nice day

Chace:
You too, thanks everyone!

Community, if you would like to learn more about CertiK, here are some useful links for you:

Website: https://www.certik.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CertiK
Telegram: https://t.me/CertiKCommunity
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/S5YbXrSgEA
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/certik/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCcFr6FTUeWDIqUdY8i1W5w
Medium: CertiK