His background previously had been C-suite security and infrastructure jobs with top Web2 giants including IBM, Google and VMware.

“I see the lack of security as being one of the biggest issues stopping mass adoption in Web3. People getting phished, projects getting hacked and scam projects are some of the main reasons people don’t like Web3. So, my co-founder and CTO Dan Caspi and I founded Hypernative to solve this problem.”

Sagie points to the advancements made in security in Web2 where security is handled much more closely with different aspects and solutions. He points out that people would have been scared by exploits before but nowadays most software companies and providers invest heavily in security..

“Web3 doesn’t have that luxury. You can’t do an audit on a smart contract and stop everything in the process.

“Back in 2022, Dan and I could see that security in Web3 was very reactive typically after the fact or very basic such as audits. There did not seem to be any platform that could monitor and detect risk in a variety of different vectors, which could also automatically react.”

One of the biggest hacks at that time was at Axie Infinity where something like a half of a billion dollars was stolen, but nobody noticed it for about six days.

“That does not happen in other industries.”

Sagie quotes the famous line that the odds are in favour of the attacker who only needs to be successful once, whereas a defender has to be right every time. There is no option not to be successful for the defender.

“We set out to build a component that knows how to monitor and detect risk, and then which helps you to react to that either manually or preferably automatically and prevent that risk. Previously the best practice was to audit the protocol, perhaps from a number of providers, or to operate a bug bounty programme for the more advanced one.

“Ironically, the underpinning features of blockchain technology can give us an edge. The open nature of blockchain is very attractive to attackers – they can see the code, decompile it, see how everything is operating including transactions and behaviours.

“However, the open visibility of the target also forces the attacker into the open too. At Hypernative we took this open scenario and used it as an advantage for defending, we can now basically find and detect the attacker before they have deployed.”

Sagie explains that for an attacker to set up their attack, they need to do lots of preparation and actions and as blockchains are not connected to anything else, this preparation has to be done on-chain. The result is that the preparation is visible to a monitoring platform that is smart enough to classify it accurately.

“We classify the different patterns and then generalize it using machine learning. Our software then detects all the different types of attacks that might happen even if we don’t know the actual vector. This is very powerful as a lot of vectors are not covered by audit.

“Even if a protocol or project says they have done a number of perfect audits they are still open to getting hacked in a variety of different vectors.”

The Hypernative solution consists of three product lines: Hypernative Platform, Hypernative Security Oracle and Hypernative Screener.

Hypernative Platform has different kinds of capabilities to prevent hacks and exploits before they happen. It monitors generic signals or things that are specific to a protocol. It can then trigger something on-chain, either through an SDK integration or manual intervention. Typically this runs in a permissionless fashion with the platform allowing it to run a specific emergency transaction when it sees a possible exploit.

Hypernative Security Oracle is the on-chain interaction which integrates on-chain with Hypernative and stops attacks as they are happening.

Finally, Hypernative Screener is not related directly to attacks but instead helps our customers understand their participants and the wallets with which they are integrating. It also looks to see if these participants were involved with previous attacks or exploits.

Core to the Hypernative model is the extensive research conducted by the team. They ran the entire Ethereum history from genesis block to current status, discovering along the way that there were four times as many hacks and exploits than were publicly known.

“We were meticulous in our research and checked them one by one. We monitored the hacks and also discovered that we were able to detect them before they occurred, which means they were preventable.”

As a result of this painstaking research, Hypernative confirms it can detect some 99.5% of all hacks with less than 0.001% false positive figures.

Currently, Hypernative works with more than 30 chains as well as many protocols and big asset managers – basically anyone investing and interacting with DeFi on-chain. There are 26 employees and more than 100 customers and that figure is growing fast.

Flare Connection

Sagie reckons that Flare and Hypernative share similar values.

“We found like-minded people that really care about the technology. One of the most important things for the Flare team is to make sure the entire ecosystem is safe. And not only the infrastructure is safe, but also to help protect anyone building on top of Flare.

“This is really supportive as most startups building on Flare don’t necessarily have time, budget or experience to think about security from all the different angles. Those teams are focusing on building their own use case and core value. By integrating Hypernative, they are augmenting their security, and we provide end-to-end protection, helping them configure and use our system. At the end of the day, we are their security partner.”

Through their extensive research and subsequent deployment, Hypernative is the market leader in security in Web3. There are plans to extend features, provide more value and address different types of risk. There are also plans to allow customers to customize the risks and to address new verticals.

“We want to be the risk DNA across Web3.”