Hacker & Chained Assets: Cat on the Shore, and Fish in the Waterer

After Curve got hacked and lost a ton of assets due to a Vyper bug, it seems like security is finally back on crypto's radar.

Before this, nobody seemed to care much. Some devs say they don't have incentives to poke at public code for bugs - it's a lot of unpaid work and you only get credit if something blows up big time. So all's quiet until disaster strikes.

Like web2, crypto's full of lurking vulnerabilities for hackers to exploit. Doesn't matter where they're from, hackers are pros at sneak attacks for profit. To defend against this, projects lean on technical security groups. But while we push for faster/cheaper solutions, hackers do the same.

Tech evolves quickly - today's hot language might be old news in 3-5 years. But business is business - companies don't want to overpay for security against theoretical threats.

Even if it pokes its head above the water, a fresh fish will get snapped up by a cat on the shore.

On the flip side, who's on the hook if on-chain assets get rekt due to a project's screw-up? Mt. Gox spent years figuring that out. We want all the DeFi gains but enough security too - that kind of asking price may require more upfront costs, lost or not.

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