ninek

Operations @code4rena & @zenith256 🤝🫡

[Matt Liston @no__________end]

Crypto VCs will tweet "where are all the visionary founders??" then fund another sports betting interface because an identical one closed a round last month and they weren't in it. The founder is 23, went to MIT, did a year at Citadel, and Paradigm is already in.

Building in crypto in 2026, you have exactly four options:
— Build hypergambling and call it financial democracy — Rebuild TradFi with a compliance layer and a token
— Leave for AI and retroactively pretend you always cared about agents
— Build something genuinely new and get treated like a science fair project

Almost everyone picks the first three because VCs will actually fund those...

[ninek @_ninek]

@friedberg Couldn’t find on your timeline criticism of the president you helped elect on the auspices of his ability to do something about the national deficit. It’s not political or partisan, so why not?

[Aaron Levie @levie]

Without getting into the specific numbers, this underlying concept and trend is going to be very real. For any worker who is able to wield AI agents effectively in an organization, their compute budgets are just going to monotonically go up over time.

This will of course start in engineering, where we already know developers can run multiple agents in parallel, or have projects going over night. But this eventually hit the rest of knowledge work as well. Lawyers that can create and review more drafts, marketed that can build more campaigns and test more ideals in parallel, sales reps that can reach out to more customers and process more leads.

Many of these activities will essentially be token-dependent in how much work a single person can do. These aren’t chatbot workflows answering a simple question, but agents that are running and processing through incredible amounts of data at scale, and generating all new forms of information.

Companies will have to figure out how they budget for this, and it likely won’t be an IT budget item over time, but ultimately owned and allocated by the business. Maybe the CFO is ultimately the head of AI :-).

[cts🌸 @gf_256]

V12 is now live for open beta. It can:

- Find valuable bugs
- Generate working, runnable PoC
- Generate patch and test the PoC against it

In our testing during audits at Zellic, Zenith, and Code4rena we've been consistently impressed.

Best of all: it's free. (Don't abuse it!)

[Code4rena @code4rena]

Our third elite Pro League competitor battling it out 2v2 in the 200,000 $OP Superchain public goods audit is a famous security researcher.

They’ve contributed massively to the security of the space…

Can you guess who? 👇

[Tay 💖 @tayvano_]

Crypto folks (hopefully) already know that Lazarus is one of the most prevalent threat actors targeting this industry.

They rekt more people, companies, protocols than anyone else.

But it's good to know exactly how they get in. Bc another smart contract audit won't save you.

[Code4rena @code4rena]

We go higher

[ninek @_ninek]

@trebienxyz @code4rena @sockdrawermoney whoa, super kind words ser! appreciate you so much!! not sure if it's obvious but i've learned a ton from you and am grateful to get to keep it rolling! 🙏🏻

[ninek @_ninek]

The memories of when I got into this album, and seeing him play this at Neumos 😌

[naticchain.eth @naticchain]

Dream team @code4rena 💜 see u in our booth at @EthereumDenver DMs open 🤝🏻

[Code4rena @code4rena]

Looking for Code4rena at ETHDenver? 👀🏔️

Our booth is set up in "Privacyville", come stop by! 🤝

P.S. There may or may not be some pretty sick merch available 🤷‍♀️

[Code4rena @code4rena]

Every great protocol needs incredible governance to go along with it...🦄

@UniswapFND’s $92,000 USDC Code4rena audit is now live through March 4th! Come help Uniswap Protocol Governance deploy the most secure governance contracts onchain ⛓️

Start now: https://t.co/6BmqAnfAgn

[kirk @OneTrueKirk]

Duplicates are the best way to know an audit is comprehensive

I would be sweating bullets if there were a unique High or Critical 😅

Thanks to the amazing @code4rena warden turnout, we had 91 duplicates for 4 unique High issues 💪

[Alexis Ohanian 🗽 @alexisohanian]

Feedback is the breakfast of champions. Feast on it. Starve your ego, and nourish your product with the insights and critiques of your customers. You needn't take action on all of it, but digest it all.

[ninek @_ninek]

🫠

[Jules @julesterpak]

At the Senate hearing with Meta, TikTok, X, Snap, and Discord CEOs. Wild angle Zuckerberg decided to take in his opening statement: “The existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes”

[Code4rena @code4rena]

Awards have been announced for the $1.1m USDC @zksync Era audit 🎉 🎉

Top 5:
🥇 xuwinnie - $502,041.99 USDC
🥈 ChainLight - $157,696.85 USDC
🥉 Audittens - $140,480.81 USDC
🏅 minhtrng - $38,573.19 USDC
🏅 erebus - $25,342.88 USDC

Read more at: https://t.co/RSskboNWpk

[Sock @sockdrawermoney]

I don’t normally make personal asks of the @code4rena community, but I have a big one to make.

I’ve really pushed the C4 team so hard this year and especially this quarter. It’s been a wild last couple months. There’s so much stuff happening behind the scenes to get ready for an amazing 2024 and it’s been an enormous amount of effort and some of it has required an exhausting and thankless slog by C4 staff.

Normally on teams I’ve led, I’ve invested time and effort at end of each year to make sure everyone has a clear sense of how valuable they are and how much their work is appreciated. But due to a massive list of enormous projects we intended to complete by end of year, I wasn’t able to do that before the holidays. And, in fact, I pushed people on the team much harder than I wanted to.

I am not above asking for help and I strongly believe the sentiment expressed by a paraphrase of Parker Palmer:

“Community means trusting someone else will be there.”

So I am indeed asking for your help.

The Code4rena staff is enormously dedicated. They truly are passionate about improving security outcomes for sponsors, they really are rooting for the wins of each warden, they obsess over the security, scalability, and UX of the platform, they agonize over technical debt, they worry about making sure everyone who contributes to C4 feels appreciated and valued and treated fairly, and they are constantly driven to make things better. And they do it without any fanfare.

I absolutely know the community appreciates their work and the results of their work much as I do, but them getting to hearing from you all would be incredibly meaningful.

So: if you’ve benefited from Code4rena this year, I w community, but I have a big one s.fore 2023 runs out and drop a note in the C4 discord as-fives channel.

I’d ask the same for appreciation of the amazing sponsors and wardens and lookouts and scouts and judges and bot racers.

Doing this will actually be the best gift we can all give each other, in getting to experience the joy of celebrating what this community means to each of us spread throughout the world.

Thank you all deeply and profoundly for the privilege of serving this community.

I’m exhausted beyond belief, but with all my heart, I’m looking forward to everything we’re going to do together in 2024.

Here’s to everyone who makes Code4rena what it is—starting with you.

[Sock @sockdrawermoney]

🧢

[ninek @_ninek]

Some content farm out there has to have the story of why we put "[Remainder intentionally left blank]" on official documents. It must be a doozy.

[Alex Masmej @AlexMasmej]

My experience with the FBI: a wake-up call to public-facing crypto people.

“Hey, are you Alexandre Masmejean, CEO of Showtime Technologies, Inc? This is the FBI calling in from Los Angeles.”

Last week I had a very strange call that surprised me so much I didn’t know whether I was in trouble or speaking to a scammer. Turns out both of these predictions were wrong.

I was the target of Asian cybercriminals who got a malware running on my computer, I was told, and was strongly encouraged to turn off my WiFi, rotate my wallets, change all my passwords, move my files to a hard drive and entirely wipe out my compromised MacBook.

The two FBI agents on the line seemed serious, but I couldn’t tell if it was real intelligence officials or scammers pretending to “protect” me. Regardless, I immediately realized one mistake I had made that could potentially fit the bill:

Three weeks prior to this call, a Telegram user “Chao Deng” “@/chaodeng” claiming to be from the known fund Hashkey signaled interested in investing in Showtime. I somehow remembered that fund name and thought nothing more of it. Long story short, that impersonator refused to join my Google Meet and proposed me to chat via a VPN-friendly “alternative” video link, which contained a script that I ran, like an idiot, in an effort to not be late.

“That sounds like a typical attack”, the FBI admits as I recount the conversation. My trust in them grew. They asked to call me back with the Telegram handle of the attacker.

But my crypto friends were skeptical. “Dude, you’re getting scammed”. One of them, who was also backed by Paradigm before, told me to reach out to samczsun.

My chat with samczun was brief. If my so-called FBI agents only called me to tighten my security practices, it could never hurt, Sam said. After telling Sam the full story, they said “I could see it” and advised me to call back the FBI to confirm their legitimacy, which I did.

I called back the number who called me. The agents gave me their full name and phone, which was matching their caller ID. They told me to call the FBI LA office and check with them, saying I could even ask to be transferred right back to them if I asked. So I did.

I google’d “FBI Los Angeles” and call the number on there. I open with “two FBI agents just called me, is this real?”. Like me, the lady on the line was suspicious but asked for more details. She shortly matched my surprised mood. “Oh yes, they are working with us on cybersecurity investigations. The contact details are matching. You have indeed been dealing with us”. So I wasn’t credulous, and the Telegram hackers truly infected my computer.

That’s it. After a laptop hard-reset and passwords/keys rotation, I was safe again. Fortunately, most of my funds were in hardware wallets, and I lost nothing.

Unfortunately, I also warned by another technical figure in crypto that beyond money, I should assume all of my data has been compromised, which is how the FBI identified me. The agents say hackers may contact my family, colleagues and friends, and I should warn everyone, which is why I’m writing this post.

Takeaways:
- if you are guilty, the FBI shows up IRL. But if you are a target like I was, the FBI may call you. It’s not always a scam.
- Never install any software on your computer from someone you don’t know. I feel so dumb typing this.
- Hardware wallets are safe. My @Ledger likely saved my personal and company funds.

⚠️ May this be a wake-up call to audit and/or upgrade your opsec before the bull market comes.

The public may be safer soon with Account Abstraction smart protections, but crypto professionals still use Far West tools, have enough money to attract villains, and can see their opsecs quickly degrade if not rigorous.

Thank you to the FBI; @samczsun @snarkyzk @eddylazzarin for the quick help + @hosseeb for pushing me to write a post-mortem. Stay safe.

PS: the FBI advised me to share this.