The rise of cryptocurrency hacks in 2022 has skyrocketed the demand for blockchain security experts, with some auditors earning more than $430,000 a year.
Speaking to Cointelegraph, the founder of blockchain recruitment firm CryptoRecruit, Neil Dundon, said that, While security audit services have long been in demand, the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols has opened up opportunities for auditors to review potentially vulnerable smart contracts:
“There has always been a demand for security auditors […] But ever since DeFi applications have been around, there has been a pretty big increase in demand for security audits across the space because a small vulnerability in the protocol can potentially lead to the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars.”
A Chainalysis report from earlier this month revealed that Hackers have stolen more than $2 billion from cross-chain bridging protocols alone this year.
In a Bloomberg report on Monday, the CEO of decentralized lending service Morpho Labs, Paul Frambot said that cryptocurrency security audits have gone from being a “nice-to-have” business expense to a “must-have”.
“Security, in my opinion, is not taken seriously enough in DeFi,” he said.
The rise in demand for cryptocurrency security auditors has led to a plethora of “for hire” ads across the industry.
According to job advertisements posted on Cryptocurrency Jobs, Blockchain audit firms are primarily looking for experienced programmers with knowledge of blockchain technology, cybersecurity, and cryptography.
Although most security auditor salaries are between $100,000 and $250,000, some companies are willing to pay more than $430,000 a yearaccording to the Web3.career job board.
The founder of the cryptocurrency recruitment firm Plexus Resource Solutions, Zeth Couceiro made a similar comment to Bloomberg, noting that, in some cases, blockchain security auditors have been earning up to $400,000 annually.
Couceiro added that these auditors tend to earn around 20% more than developers focused on Solidity, which is the most popular programming language used to deploy smart contracts on Ethereum and other Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible blockchains.
Among the top vulnerabilities that security auditors look for in smart contracts are timestamp dependency, reentry attacks, random number vulnerability, and misspellings.
The Bloomberg report noted that venture capital firms have already invested $257 million in cryptocurrency security audit firms this year, an increase of 38.9% over the full year of 2021according to CB insights.
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