Blockhunters

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the technical director of HungryGhost, a team of multi-disciplinary colleagues bringing digital art to the world in the form of non-fungible tokens.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Blockhunters?

We needed a security audit for an ERC-721 contract to sell a collection of generative art and engaged with Blockhunters to examine our contract for any security vulnerabilities. Our goals were to keep transactions safe for ourselves and our customers.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

After a bit of simple online research, Blockhunters stood out because their team all had highly credible and well-established LinkedIn profiles and their website showcased legitimate, high-level work on verifiable blockchain projects. They responded quickly to my request, had excellent customer support, and were able to give us the results quickly despite delays on our side.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

We delivered them our smart contract for a security audit early on a Saturday morning, and by the time we had finalized payment on the next business day, they had already done part of the audit. Their security audit performed over 30 checks and analyzed every potential issue that concerned us. At the end of automated analysis, they had a human manually inspect our contract as well, and that was complete by the following business day also.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We interacted personally with the customer service director, whose responses were quick and reliable. During our security analysis, another member of the Blockhunters security team reviewed our code for any issues that could potentially avoid automated detection.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

They were able to confirm that over 30 known security vulnerabilities were detected in our contract within just a few hours, which allowed us to safely publish the contract on a tight deadline. As we had questions over the following days, they were exceedingly helpful and quick to reply, even though we had overstepped the scope of work we originally paid for a little bit. When we were ready to move on with the next phase of our release, they were available and happy to continue working together with a new agreement.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Their communication was prompt, clear, consistent, and professional. Extremely effective workflow, plain and simple.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

When I first looked at their website, I was impressed by how transparent and credible they were. It made me comfortable that working with them would be a natural, human experience. As it turned out, that was exactly how it went. Every interaction was productive and supportive. They are a team of humans you can learn about on their website, whose faces you can see, whose stories you can read. So, it was natural for us to assume that working with them would be friendly as well. We were delighted that working with them felt exactly like we had expected after getting to know them a little bit.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Honestly, I have no notes. Excellent experience, definitely looking forward to continuing to work with them in the future. I was so pleased with their work that I sat down to write this positive review immediately.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I was the CTO of Dispatch Labs, a blockchain infrastructure company creating a layer-one, blockchain distributed tech solution for big data and big data analytics. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Blockhunters?

We needed a third-party security audit before we went live with our main product release. For a layer-one blockchain solution, all of the code is opensource. That provides a lot of benefits for security, in that there are many eyes on it, but it also means we’re vulnerable to people being able to manipulate the code when they run it on their own machines. 

It’s really hard to find experts in distributed systems who can understand how the same code running on a bunch of different machines works together, and how one bad actor can play into this.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Blockhunters audited all of the software we developed before releasing it to the public. They checked not only whether our code was bug-free, but they were also able to audit the theory behind the consensus, to help prevent bad actors from being able to affect the entire network. Their services were both on the tactical as well as the strategy and conceptual level.

What is the team composition?

We worked with about four people.

How did you come to work with Blockhunters?

We interviewed several companies; security auditing is a very common practice in the blockchain industry, as we work with public networks. We were referred to Blockhunters. They were very knowledgeable about the infrastructure level, whereas a lot of teams in the space are much more knowledgeable about the application level and auditing smart contracts. We really liked that they demonstrated good expertise and understanding of layer one and the consensus. They were also very reasonably priced for their services.

How much have you invested with them?

This was a one-time project cost broken down into three milestones, with a kickoff, mid-way, and final installment. I believe the arrangement was for about $40,000. 

What is the status of this engagement?

Our work together went from November 2018–February 2019. We launched our product in December.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

They found around 25 issues that we were ablet to address, ranging in severity from not terribly critical to priority zero urgency. They found two primary, mission-critical bugs that would have been showstoppers for us. 

How did Blockhunters perform from a project management standpoint?

They were excellent. We had a really positive experience working with them, from the pre-project and their proposal to their weekly touchpoints that they had working closely with our QA team, through their final written deliverables. It was a top-notch experience across the board, and I’d love to work with them again.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Blockhunters is young and savvy. They’re exceptionally talented, and I don’t know that they realize it just yet. Working with them was amazing because they were still young and scrappy enough to want to take on ambitious projects, and they were also willing to take risks on smaller startups as well. They weren’t bogged down with the overhead of operations that you often get with larger security groups.

Are there any areas they could improve?

From a project perspective, I really couldn’t be happier with their work. If I were to give them advice on the business front, I might tell them to value their work a little higher and charge more.

Any advice for potential customers?

I’d tell them to go for it. If they need a security audit done, I have nothing but positive things to say about my experience working with Blockhunters.