2022 has seen the number of crypto hacks increase exponentially and this has resulted in skyrocketing demand for blockchain security experts.
As a matter of fact, some auditors are raking in salaries of about $430,000 a year.
DeFi boosts demand
Neil Dundon, the founder of CryptoRecruit, a blockchain recruitment firm, said that the demand for security audit services is not new.
However, he said that new opportunities had opened up for auditors with decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, as they can revenue smart contracts that are potentially vulnerable.
He said that the demand for security audits had gone up with DeFi apps because even a small vulnerability in a protocol can result in losses worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Earlier this month, Chainalysis released a report, which revealed that almost $2 billion had been stolen by hackers from exploits in cross-chain bridge protocols this year alone.
On Monday, a report from Bloomberg revealed that Paul Frambot, the chief executive of Morpho Labs, a decentralized lending service, believes that crypto security audits are now a must have a business expense.
He thinks that they are no longer just ‘nice to have’, but crucial. He added that he believes that the decentralized finance (DeFi) space does not take security very seriously.
Demand for security
Crypto security auditors have seen a rise in demand for their services and this means that the industry has seen a horde of ‘for hire’ ads.
The job advertisements that are posted reveal that most blockchain audit companies are searching for experienced programmers who are familiar with cryptography, cybersecurity, and blockchain technology.
The security audit salaries that are paid to these people are between the $100,000 and $250,000 range, but statistics show that some companies are also willing to pay $430,000 a year.
Another crypto recruitment firm also revealed that there are also scenarios where blockchain security auditors are making about $400,000 a year.
Other details
As a matter of fact, statistics have shown that the salaries of these auditors are 20% higher than that of Solidity-focused developers.
This is a programming language and is in fact the most popular one used for implementing smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, along with other blockchains that are compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
There are various vulnerabilities that exist in smart contracts and security auditors have to identify the top ones, such as random number vulnerability, timestamp dependency, spelling mistakes, and reentrancy attacks.
According to the Bloomberg report, an amount of $257 million has already been invested by venture capital firms into crypto security audit firms in 2022.
This is an increase of 38.9% as compared to last year. However, the number is not surprising because the number of crypto attacks has already risen.
As a matter of fact, it is mostly decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols that have become the target of hackers and there have been some massive exploits that have happened in 2022 so far.
