C4 Trailblazers: prePO
“I highly recommend undergoing an audit contest specifically, because the more eyes that are on your code, the more likely that any issues will be discovered!“ — Xavier Ekkel, prePO Founder
Next up in the arena is prePO, a decentralized exchange for pre-IPO stocks & pre-IDO tokens. As a testament to their dedication to security, they’ve returned to the Arena for a second time, this time with a $36,500 prize pool for Wardens participating in their competitive audit. For 3 days Wardens will be hunting rare bugs and submitting them to earn $USDC rewards.
We caught up with prePO founder, Xavier Ekkel, and asked him a bit about what motivates their return to Code4rena, the new features getting secured by Wardens and some more insights into the project.
Welcome back! Tell us what prompted you to return to the Arena, a new upgrade? New features?
Since last audit, we’ve improved upon our architecture by expanding its functionality, increasing modularity and flexibility, enhancing security, and reducing complexity. For example, we can now support depositing & trading within a single transaction, instant fee rebates, score-based access to the guarded launch based on your ownership of different NFTs, more flexible yield strategies, more granular access control, and much more.
After they’ve been secured, how do you think these changes to the product will affect the industry or the crypto community as a whole?
Modularity, flexibility, security, and simplicity are all goals that any engineering organization would/should be striving towards with their codebase, and by nature of our codebase being public and open source under an AGPL V3 license, we hope that we can help and inspire other teams to improve their code quality as well!
What sets you apart from the competition?
In the traditional world, only accredited or institutional investors are able to gain access to the private markets — completely excluding retail investors. Even those that are able to gain access are still faced with enormous downsides, such as unclear pricing, high fees, limited liquidity, lengthy lockups, and days/weeks/months of processing.
prePO will be the first and only platform in DeFi allowing all investors to gain exposure to private market opportunities. Furthermore, users can gain this exposure with instant processing, transparent market-driven pricing, low fees, scalable liquidity, token incentives, and full custody over their funds.
It’s not your first time sharing your code with C4’s community of anonymous security researchers. What do you think others could learn from undergoing an audit with Code4rena?
With the amount of hacks occurring every other day in crypto, the need for security has never been more evident. I highly recommend undergoing an audit contest specifically, because the more eyes that are on your code, the more likely that any issues will be discovered!
It seems like every other week there’s a new event in the industry that makes crypto projects revisit their approach to security, what do you think is a security non-negotiable that new web3 projects should be thinking about?
Projects should be building with security in mind from day one. An audit should only be a final check on what should already be comprehensively tested internally. After launching, bug bounties are also a great way to reduce risk on an ongoing basis.
Complete the following sentence: “The best crypto projects…”
…are decentralized.
Learn more about prePO
- Website: https://prepo.io/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/prepo_io
- Discord: https://discord.gg/prePO
prePO’s $36.5K security audit contest opens December 8th, 2022, and runs for 3 days. Details at code4rena.com.
C4 Trailblazers puts the spotlight on projects and founders that have returned to the Arena and demonstrated a commitment to security.
