Press Room

Launched on December 9, 2020, Immunefi is the premier bug bounty platform focused on blockchain and smart contract security. We provide bug bounty hosting, consultation, bug triaging, and program management services to blockchain and smart contract projects.

Bug bounty programs are open invitations to security researchers to discover and disclose potentially vulnerabilities in projects’ smart contracts and applications, thereby protecting projects and their users. For their good work, security researchers receive a reward based on the severity of the vulnerability, as determined by the project affected.

Why have a bug bounty program at all? In 2020 alone, hacks and scams cost the DeFi community over $238m, and bug bounties can prevent those hacks from happening. Bug bounty programs surface vulnerabilities so they can be fixed before they get exploited in malicious hacks that destroy projects and ruin reputations.

Bug bounties:

• Increase trust among users
• increase trust among developers
• Increase trust among the DeFi community
• Incentivize security researchers to protect the community
• Boost DeFi’s overall reputation

Everyone wins.

Immunefi is doing for DeFi what companies like PayPal, Stripe, and Shopify have done for online shopping: removing security risk and making high-quality decentralized financial products safe for the average person. We help prevent hacks to make DeFi safe for everyone.

Immunefi’s Origin Story

In early 2020, Mitchell Amador was hiking in the Swiss alps, and while trudging through the snow, he received a notification on his phone that another crypto project had just been hacked. In that brief moment, hackers stole millions of users’ funds. The news of this hack was an emotional hit because he had major investments in smart contracts.

Shortly after the hike, Mitchell came down with a fever, and during that fever, he came to the conclusion that something was deeply wrong with security in DeFi, and there was no one who could help him. He didn’t feel safe about his investments and realized no one else did either.

The talent necessary to solve this problem existed in the community, but there was nothing pulling it all together, and hackers had no incentive themselves to protect projects. There had to be something new to bring everyone together to help make the community safe. And that’s when Immunefi, the bug bounty platform focused on smart contracts, was born.

Our Customers

Since launching, our customers have included smart contract projects like BadgerDAO, Harvest Finance, yAxis, Perpetual, Fuel, and Obyte, among others, and we are in the process of onboarding many more.

Founder Bios:

Mitchell Amador is the founder and CEO of Immunefi. Prior to Immunefi, Mitchell was best known for making Sophia the Robot a worldwide sensation as the CMO of SingularityNET and as the VP of Marketing at Steemit, where he drove its adoption and growth, resulting in a peak $2b valuation. He was a member of the rLoop Hyperloop team, drove growth to the world’s dominant web .pdf company, and helped launch the largest user-owned open world, Decentraland. When not building technology, Mitchell spends his time researching the history of culture, religion, and economics.

Duncan Townsend is co-founder and CTO of Immunefi, with a background as a Machine Learning and Security Engineer. After completing a S.B. and M.Eng. in AI at MIT, he has worked at a series of pure-tech startups before co-founding his own at Immunefi. While at MIT, in 2010, he started hacking on cryptocurrency projects. Other past projects have included direct image-to-trajectory deep neural nets, zero-knowledge homomorphic encryption chat routing, formally verified encrypted chat, and a high-performance regular expression compiler. At Immunefi, he is tapping into his expertise not only in software security best practices, but also in physical security, operational security, and encryption.

Travin Keith is co-founder and COO of Immunefi. He spends most of his time as an entrepreneur, consultant, and open source advocate. He leverages his experiences gained from living in eight countries across four continents, ranging from large open source projects like co-authoring the white paper of Hyperledger, a Linux Foundation project, and contributing to the European Commission’s Blockchain4EU project, to startups like co-founding STOKR, an STO platform on Ethereum and the Liquid Network by Blockstream. He has also been involved with educational projects around blockchain and crypto at ETH Zurich, such as BIOTS and BETH, and has been a regular public speaker, including twice at the annual Hackers’ Congress at Paralelni Polis, a crypto-only café in Prague.

Recent Announcements

See our blog and Medium for the latest news from Immunefi.

Contacts

For all media and interview requests, please contact press@immunefi.com.