Immunefi Raises 5.5 Million to Help Combat DeFi Hacks

The bug bounty platform Immunefi has raised 5.5 million in funding to help fight off the recent surge in hacks plaguing Defi.

With Blueprint Forest, Electric Capital, Framework Ventures, Bitscale Capital, P2P Capital, IDEO Colab, The LAO, BR Capital, 3rd Prime Ventures, North Island Ventures, and other individual investors all participating.

Immunefi is looking to secure safety within DeFi projects, by offering ethical hackers aka whitehats, bounties to look for glitches, errors, and any vulnerability within a project’s code for rewards.

The world of DeFi has become exceedingly difficult to enter with any sense of safety due to the over 23 individual attacks that have gained hackers more than $1.7 billion in stolen funds.

“DeFi is unique because vulnerabilities in code represent a possibility of a direct loss of users’ money,” said Mitchell Amador, founder, and CEO of Immunefi. Adding that programs such as these “have proved one of the most effective ways to deal with critical security holes.”

Last week saw Immunefi pay a $2 million bounty for the Ethereum scaling network, Polygon. The funds were sent to a whitehat hacker who informed Poly of an over $850 million dollar error. The company partnered with Immunifi after a hack, earlier this year took $610 million out of its project.

Another similar instance paid out 1.05 million to a whitehat who discovered a $10 million dollar critical glitch within the decentralized exchange DEX and was paid using Belt Finance.

The company states that as of today they protect over $50 billion in user funds and have paid up to 7.5 million in bounties with DeFi protocols like Synthetix, Chainlink, SushiSwap, PancakeSwap, Nexus Mutual, Cream Finance, 1inch, Compound, Bancor, Alchemix, and ArmorFi among its clients.

With DeFi seeing a new headline every week pertaining to hacks, it’s impermeable that services such as Immunifi continue to grow and create new tactics to combat malicious hackers, If we like to see this industry we love continue to flourish at the pace we all know it can. With this hefty round of funding, I have no doubts that these bounties will continue to become less and less as the hackers are discouraged to go after projects.