A sharp increase in hacking this year leads to crypto security experts making $430k salaries

The call for more security audits in the crypto sector comes with a rapid increase in security experts' salaries

By Shashank Bhardwaj

Image: Shutterstock

This year has seen a record increase in crypto hacking, with a report from Chainalysis stating that hackers have taken upwards of $2 billion from cross-chain bridge protocols alone. The founder of CryptoRecruit, a blockchain recruitment firm, Neil Dundon, came up with a reason for the subsequent increase in crypto security experts’ salaries. He said, “There’s always been a demand for security auditors [...] But since DeFi apps have been out there, there has been quite a big increase in demand for security audits across the space because one small vulnerability in the protocol can potentially lead to the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars.”

CEO of decentralised lending service Morpho Labs Paul Frambot built upon this, saying that crypto security audits have moved from a “nice to have” business activity to a “must have” one. “Security is, in my opinion, not taken sufficiently seriously in DeFi,” he said.

These statements portray the importance of crypto security experts within the industry and justify the high salaries they seem to be raking in due to the demand. According to advertisements posted on job boards, blockchain audit companies are recruiting experienced programmers with an existing knowledge of blockchain technology, cybersecurity, and cryptography.

While the majority of security audit salaries are within the $100,000 - $250,000 range, some companies are investing more money into security of assets and paying experts $430,000 per year. Founder of crypto recruitment firm, Plexus Resource Solutions, Zeth Couceiro, vouched for this as well, stating that a number of blockchain security auditors have been taking home an annual salary of $400,000. He added that these specialised auditors make roughly 20 percent more programmers working with the most popular programming language, Solidity, which is used to deploy smart contracts on Ethereum and other EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) blockchains.

In light of the rising crypto hacks, security auditors are mainly focusing on vulnerabilities such as timestamp dependency, reentrancy attacks, random number vulnerability, and spelling mistakes. These might make the smart contracts more prone to risk and attack from hackers.

A report by Bloomberg discussed the rise in investment into crypto security audit companies in 2022, with VCs providing $257 million to these companies, a steep 38.9 percent increase from last year.

The writer is the founder at yMedia. He ventured into crypto in 2013 and is an ETH maximalist. Twitter: @bhardwajshash

Crypto wallet users are warned as scammers might get active during the potential Ethereum hard fork