Block 16 at HoshoCon
The First Blockchain Security Conference
Two weeks ago I got to speak at HoshoCon, the first blockchain security conference of its kind, along with a ton of other amazing speakers including Andreas Antonopoulos.
The crowd was a mix of developers, companies, and even people brand new to the industry trying to figure out what’s going. We met up with a lot of familiar faces and some new ones as well in the Las Vegas crypto scene and beyond.
But to the point, here are some highlights from the talks at the conference:
Keynote – Andreas Antonopoulos
Andreas is undoubtedly one of the most influential speakers in the industry. Our entire team has followed him for years and watched many of his videos and ingested his opinions. A lot of his talk that day was on his philosophy that people need to be more mindful of how they use cryptocurrency to get the full power of truly being your own bank.
He drove home that so many people entrust their cryptocurrencies to now large corporations who are being a “bank” for their cryptocurrencies when the entire point of cryptocurrencies was that you could become your own bank. He drove home the point that in terms of security if there is centralization, there is massive risk for blockchain assets specifically because there is no reversal system for unintended transfers such as in the traditional banking world.
So as Andreas put it if 1 million people are trusting a large exchange then their security needs to be >1 million better than each individual users personal security of holding onto their coins or the risk continues to grow.
This is an extremely powerful thought and while the community needs to find a balance between ease of use and security, he shows that sometimes we need to lean on security and keep evolving the education of users so they can get the true power out of cryptocurrencies.
Tips to Raising Capital for Blockchain Security Companies — Jaron Lukasiewicz
Jaron, a friend of Block 16, talked about tips and tricks to raising capital as a blockchain company. As a founder of Coinsetter (acquired by Kraken) Jaron has had experience with raising capital for startups of his own. Here’s a few of his tips:
- Get straight to the point when you’re cold emailing potential VCs. Don’t tell them how reading this email will be good for them, use the 6 seconds of attention you are getting to make your point.
- Make a list of Venture Capital firms that are investing in your space and only contact ones that are working in your area.
- Look at the portfolio companies of the Venture Capital firms and if they are already invested in a company like yours you may want to look elsewhere as they won’t want to dilute their investment with diversification.
In addition to his talk I spoke to Jaron about the future of security tokens and got his opinion on how per country regulation will effect these tokens over time. In the end, we agreed that security tokens are valuable but they will take awhile to become liquid and be able to grow into more and more markets because of individual regulations on a per country basis.
Currently Jaron runs Influential Capital, a firm that advises on Security Token Offerings and startup fundraising. In addition, they also just launched their software to create a white label security token exchange.
Smart Contract Security and Honey Pots – Petros Ring (me)
Finally, I did a developer centric talk about smart contract security and honey pots. I went through some of the major hacks that occurred in the Ethereum realm: The DAO, Parity Hack #1, and Parity Hack #2.
In the presentation you can see below I delved into the reasons why these hacks could happen. What you’ll notice is the major mistake is the developers tend to leave some way for a user to have more control then they were supposed to or leaving out simple initialization clauses.
As many people wondered whenever I told them about the title of my talk, Honey pots are smart contracts that try to trick hackers into losing Ethereum on actions that they believe would gain them Ethereum.
Above you can see an example function that a hacker could mistake as a way to earn Ethereum if they don’t understand the intricacies of Solidity. Say for example the contract had 1 ETH as the current balance. A regular programmer may read that if they send more Ethereum than the current balance then they will get their balance back plus the current balance of the contract.
Instead though, the contracts balance is updated before any of the code is executed, therefore there will always be a higher balance than a user can possibly send. So the hacker loses their money and hopefully learns a lesson.
Also last, but not least, we all met with Andreas!
About the Author: Petros is a Blockchain Engineer at a crypto venture studio, Block 16. We are a full service blockchain agency that does crypto-economics, network syndication, marketing services and blockchain development. If you would like to reach out to me send an email to petros@block16.io.
