Web3 security company, Blockaid, has secured $33million in a series-A funding round. The Israel-based start-up has top customers in the industry like MetaMask and OpenSea.
The latest funding round was led by Ribbit Capital and Variant. It also saw participation from Cyberstarts, Sequoia Capital, and Greylock Partners.
The company aims to utilise the funds to scale its team and product, while expanding security to all companies in Web3. It seeks to secure the space by protecting their users from fraud, phishing, and hacks, said the official announcement.
In talking about the industry’s security challenges, Blockaid called Web3 “broken”, contrary to how it is overstated to be the solution. Fund loss per capita in this space exceeds that of all the other industries, said Blockaid. A whopping $14billion was stolen last year alone which is twice as much as the $7bn in direct losses from all non-crypto cybercrime.
Blockaid assured the community to be committed in tackling this issue. Its “secret” is its team which consists of “the best security engineers Israeli cyber intelligence has to offer”.
Co-founded by Ido Ben-Natan and Raz Niv, who served together in Israeli Cyber Intelligence, Blockaid claims to have scanned over 450m transactions and prevented 1.2m malicious transactions in just the past six months. In doing so, it successfully secured over $500m of user funds that could have been compromised.
It ensures security in two ways. First is through its dApp Scanning Engine, which is responsible for imitating all potential user actions in a decentralised application (dApp). It determines if these actions, as well as the dApp itself, are malicious.
The second solution is the dApp Scanning Sandbox. This is known for safely simulating user interactions with a dApp without putting any user assets at risk. Even a single transaction within the sandbox being identified as malicious will make the entire dApp to be instantly marked as malicious.
Both of these Blockaid’s security solutions are integrated into wallets, allowing providers to monitor transactions, interact with dApps, and communicate with smart contracts, thereby acting as an additional layer of protection.
The blog post also shed light on when Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s X (formerly Twitter) account was hacked. As soon as the reports were out of this incident, the Blockaid team immediately investigated the data. Its system then found the malicious dApp over 24 hours prior to the tweet going live and that the site that was linked wasn’t an NFT project but rather a wallet drainer.
Attackers then used his account to trick unsuspecting Web3 users into a malicious attack. This resulted in a loss of about $1m worth of assets. While many users were scammed into connecting their wallets, the wallets where Blockaid was enabled were prevented from signing the transaction. The company called this the “power of proactive detection for our customers”.
Blockaid believes the future of Web3 in the next phase of innovation to be the one where every transaction will need to be scanned and secured. In emphasising its commitment to the cause, it added: “We believe that users shouldn’t have to know they’re interacting with crypto. We believe that Web3 should just work, and work securely. We’re not alone in believing that Blockaid is the solution.”
