Crypto & Growth | Researcher | Self-Custody Security Strategist @SherlockDefi
Lisbon, Portugal
Joined April 2020
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Immutable Alpha retweeted
Join us tomorrow as we discuss how to build a culture of security, choose the right audit, and more with @Aptos, @panana_predict, and our own @ImmutableAlpha!
nitter.cf/i/spaces/1nAKEEjZQAlKL
Immutable Alpha retweeted
The “Let’s Ride” livestream by @BMXDeFi is booked through August with an insane lineup of guests:
8/5: @sherlockdefi with @ImmutableAlpha
8/12: @b3dotfun with @darylX24
8/19: @Optimism with @sammcingvale
8/26: @nillion with @juanaxyz00
If you’re interested in coming on, reach out as we will continue to book out into the future.
Immutable Alpha retweeted
Fading @fundstrat Tom Lee has been a losing game for a very long time...
Immutable Alpha retweeted
I believe audit contests and independent auditors have done more to bring down smart contract hack risks than anything else 💪
I could write a dissertation on this but failure of smart contract exploit insurance comes down to two dynamics:
1) No market-clearing price
2) Few, large black-swan risks
For #1, if the actual risk of a smart contract hack for a protocol were ~0.1%, and protocols/users were willing to pay ~1.0% for coverage, this would be a pretty good business.
In order to make this an INCREDIBLE business, you'd want #2 solved as well. Ideally that looks like 10,000 protocols that all want ~$10M of coverage. This business would cash flow $900M in profit for insurers annually with ~0 unprofitable years over a 200-year horizon.
In reality, the risk of blue chip DeFi protocols getting hacked is still closer to ~3% (+/- 2%), or a hack once every 33 years. And protocol teams/users are willing to pay more like 0.1%-0.3%. The concentrated risk compounds the problem: there are a few dozen teams that want $1Bn+ of insurance at that price but aren't interested in $10M of insurance, and maybe a couple hundred that would want $10M-$500M. Even if you could underwrite that market your risks are super concentrated in a dozen or two dozen protocols and a couple unlucky events can sink you.
Note: This is for smart contract insurance, which is a subset of the broader on-chain insurance category.
Despite these dynamics, I'm still incredibly bullish on smart contract hack insurance, it's just going to look different and take longer than we thought.
Immutable Alpha retweeted
The next platform I will go through will be probably the most gamified audit competition platform - you guessed it, it's @sherlockdefi !
I was brought to Sherlock when I saw that you can earn up to 12k a week as the LSW. I absolutely crushed my first audit here and got a whopping 4 dollars and 12 cents! 😄
✅ What I love the most here is what brought me here - did you prove you are really good? You get an opportunity to earn a fix on audit competitions! And the fix is not even small - starting at 7.5k a week. Really good money if you ask me
✅ The next thing I love is how the platform decides if you are good. As a chess player (and a former gamer lol) I love ELO, and bringing ELO to work is something that can reward your dopamine-addicted brain greatly and drive you towards better and better performance 😄 I also love that you have to be active in order to keep the ELO
✅ Real time judging is a really interesting idea. Who better to judge as those who have read the code and understand it well? Of course, sometimes there are slip-ups, sometimes somebody judges incorrectly, but guess what? Yes, you guessed it, another ELO! And no rewards for bad judging! 😁
✅ The competitive environment makes the competition fierce, so if you make it on Sherlock, the chance is you are really good. But if you are a beginner, the chance is you will most likely get rekt 😅
❌ There are some strict rules that often invalidate findings that are impactful, even according to the sponsors, and should be rewarded. This is however just a small problem imo.
Overall, Sherlock is great if you have some competitions or audits behind you and want to prove that you are really the one guy. As a beginner you will most likely get rekt, but hey, you always learn from your mistakes. However here your ELO will suffer, so maybe you can postpone it a bit (or create a new account once you are good? 😆)
Lmk your thoughts, and see you in the next post! ,
Today I will go over the platform that first brought me to the audit competitions world - the one and only @code4rena
A few months before I started participating in the audit competitions, I heard tales of some beasts raking 100s of thousands of dollars on this platform by submitting bugs, which caught my attention.
Some of my first audits were actually on C4, although I didn't win anything yet, and my first win was around 40 dollars - here I was stunned how there could have been around 20 HMs (dont recall the exact count) in such a small codebase (I got 3, I thought I found everything and IGMI lol)
✅ What I love the most is that if you really beat everybody by identifying the most issues or the highest amount of rare issues, you get 10/20% of the total pot - I see this as a huge catalyst for SRs to give it their best and outperform everyone, also a real challenge to get that hunter/gatherer badge
✅ Private contests for the best - if you are on a good streak on C4 you can get more opportunities in the form of the invitational contest
✅ What I really loved about C4 was the Zenith leauge where you were able to snatch the pot reserved for reserved researchers if you outperformed them - it was a great catalyst to give the competition your best imo but it was apparently removed since I last competed 😅
☑️ When I began you were not able to see the submissions and escalate/give more light to these if you haven't met certain conditions. I viewed this as a con since even the judges can make mistakes, but this restriction was apparently removed so I see it as a step forward for C4 😄
Overall, C4 has always a lot of participants, which means that here you can really see and prove that you are good if you are good. The hunter-gatherer bonuses make it especially atractive to give the hunt your best. And if you are not good yet, a lot of SRs will beat you which will drive you forward for more progress
See you soon in the next post where I will share my thoughts on other audit competitions platform!
Immutable Alpha retweeted
1/ The market is crashing today due to DeepSeek taking over, but imho, this is one of the most bullish things that could happen for $TAO. Why? Because it proves that open-source AI is winning. Let me explain 👇
A short thread 🧵 - @opentensor
Immutable Alpha retweeted
Scaling Ethereum L1 and L2s in 2025 and beyond
vitalik.eth.limo/general/202…
Immutable Alpha retweeted
Bitcoin is up over 60% since Germany sold all their Bitcoin.
Counter-trading inept governments is usually a winning strategy.
Immutable Alpha retweeted
🇵🇹 The Evolutions: Kujira Lisbon 🇵🇹
After the establishment of Kujira Academy as a marketing powerhouse, we looked to our final venture, Web3 events.
These events would serve as the culmination of all our efforts so far, bringing together our skills in marketing, education, and community building,
📔 Table of Contents 📔
🔹Kujira Lisbon: An Overview
🔹Event 1: Kujira
🔹Event 2: Developing 101
🔹Event 3: NAMI
🔹Event 4: AQLA
🔹Kujira Academy: Making its Mark
🔹The Evolutions: Kujira Africa
So, what did Kujira Lisbon involve, and what were the key highlights of this venture?
Immutable Alpha retweeted
JUST IN: 🇺🇸 Mike Novogratz says after Trump's win, he sees a "substantial shift in the energy" of the crypto industry.
This will bring “hundreds of billions” into the ecosystem 🙌
Immutable Alpha retweeted
$TAO in Oct 2022 was worth $23
$TAO in Oct 2023 was worth $51
$TAO in Oct 2024 is worth $556
The #Bittensor network grows stronger, the $TAO price follows ⚫️
Immutable Alpha retweeted
Ethereum has scaled while keeping L1 maximally decentralized with modest validator requirements
While this has generated good-to-have conversations about value accrual of L1 relative to L2s, ultimately ETH’s primary value proposition is as a non-sovereign SoV.
Fees earned influence supply dynamics but the important part is Ethereum remains secure regardless of usage/tx fees, unlike BTC.
L2s proliferate the use of ETH as money— its intended purpose, while allowing a wider range of use cases and cheap txs for the greater Ethereum economy. L2s like Base and Arbitrum are now doing more txs than mainnet itself, which was the intention of the Ethereum scaling roadmap.
The full vision will benefit from synchronous composability and shared sequencing across many Based Rollups— key pieces of what’s left to execute on the roadmap.
This is currently not well understood, but it will be in time once greater L2 use materializes and new use cases enabled by cheap+fast txs.
