By Riley Kaminer
According to blockchain data platform Chainalysis, 2022 was the biggest year ever for crypto hacks and exploits. $625 million was stolen from the Ronin Network, $325 million from Wormhole Bridge, $190 from Nomad Bridge – just to name a few.
Miami-based startup Spearbit is on a mission to help increase the security of web3 projects by connecting these entrepreneurs with independent security experts. Today, Spearbit announced a $7 million fundraise led by Framework Ventures. According to the company, Nascent, 1kx, Volt Capital, Breed VC and Robot Ventures also participated in the round. In 2021, Spearbit raised a $1.5 million pre-seed.
Spearbit will use these funds to build its marketplace, which they call Cantina. The platform aims to be a one-stop-shop for any web3-related security needs. The company plans to start by launching two products. The first, Cantina Managed, will help freelance auditors build their business; the second, Cantina Guilds, will enable small- and medium-sized audit firms to offer their services via Cantina.
Cantina aims to solve a vexing problem that web3 builders face: finding top talent to audit the security of their code. Spearbit asserts that clients are often asked to compromise on one of the following price, quality, or responsiveness. Meanwhile, the most scalable web3 security providers typically have the worst quality while the best shops have limited capacity to meet demand.
“Right now there’s no price transparency,” co-founder Spencer Macdonald told TechCrunch. “If you go to these centralized auditing firms they say, ‘Hey this is the price deal with it,’ it takes weeks to get a quote, there’s no way to figure out who’s best for a particular tech stack and on the talent side, auditors at these firms are very talented but have no work-life balance and it’s like a sweatshop because they audit continuously.”
Cantina will take a 20-30% cut of the fees – significantly less than most audit firms, which tend to keep the majority of their margins. They plan to pass on these profits to the auditors themselves. “That’s a huge change because it’s the same talent pool in this community since day one that are former employees of these [firms],” said Macdonald.
“We were disappointed by the state of security in the ecosystem with hacks every week,” shared co-founder Hari Mulackal. “There’s a big need for security in the space and there wasn’t enough [being done], so we wanted to solve our own problems and create something to fix it.”
Mulackal added that while many web3 projects gravitate towards the security professionals with the most marketing, the best engineers aren’t very good at marketing themselves. “We want to give visibility to independent people and small teams, these boutique firms instantly connect to Cantina — they don’t need to hire a marketing person, [or a] legal person; they can have it handled by us.”
While security was deprioritized during the recent bull market, Macdonald believes that strong security measures will ensure the whole crypto ecosystem is able to grow and improve in the future. “Now, in the bear market the industry is starting to self-regulate and have this common ethic of needing to ship secure code,” he said. “That’s been a definite change.”
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