Last week’s security incident was neither isolated nor attributable to any of the parties involved. It could have happened - and has happened - to many key players in our industry.
The web has been under attack since its inception, and web3 exposes even more value to that same attack surface. Nation-state level attacks are more frequent, and software supply chains are increasingly compromised. These are engineering challenges - not just crypto challenges. The good news is that tools exist, and mitigations are being built into the stack.
The crypto ecosystem is leading secure, democratized value transfer at scale.
Nation-state cyberattacks won’t slow digital-asset adoption, just as malware in npm packages hasn’t reversed open-source momentum. I feel strongly about this as a technologist, and Blockdaemon does as a pioneering software company.
The crypto ecosystem is maturing rapidly. Complexity is rising and attack surfaces are expanding. But at the root remains “what you see is what you sign,” a concept near and dear to my heart as a Ledger alum. It’s a simple principle that is difficult to implement.
So, I wanted to take some time to clearly outline the technical trends informing our decisions on how we build secure earn products for digital assets at Blockdaemon in a blog series.
The first blog breaks down crypto transactions and security. Crypto transactions have complex multi-stage workflows - our security experts share some details here.
In our second blog, network resilience under stress is explained in the context of Ethereum's exit queue. Ethereum has proven to be resilient during industry-wide events - our analysis on the impact of Ethereum exit queue surges can be found here.
Next, "Securing Critical Crypto Transactions with API Gateway Validation and Clear Signing" outlines how Blockdaemon’s staking architecture adds an independent checkpoint before signing, showing how every transaction is safe, expected, and verifiably aligned with the original intent.
Alex Munch-Hansen, Blockdaemon’s Cryptography Engineer, explains the liquidity, integrations, and security implications of vaults compared to native staking.
Finally, Alexandre Karlov, Blockdaemon's Director, Cryptography and Security Engineering, explains how MPC transaction governance and validation scales out the single point of trust.
