The rise of crypto hacks over 2022 has skyrocketed demand for blockchain safety consultants, with some auditors making upwards of $430,000 per yr.

Talking with Cointelegraph, blockchain recruitment agency CryptoRecruit founder Neil Dundon mentioned that whereas safety audit companies have lengthy been in demand, the rise of decentralized-finance (DeFi) protocols has opened up alternatives for auditors to assessment doubtlessly weak good contracts:

“There’s all the time been a requirement for safety auditors […] However since DeFi apps have been on the market, there was fairly an enormous improve in demand for safety audits throughout the house as a result of one small vulnerability within the protocol can doubtlessly result in the lack of a whole bunch of thousands and thousands of {dollars}.”

A report from Chainalysis earlier this month revealed that hackers extracted greater than $2 billion from cross-chain bridge protocols alone this yr.

In a Bloomberg report on Aug. 22, CEO of decentralized lending service Morpho Labs Paul Frambot mentioned that crypto safety audits have moved from a “good to have” enterprise expense to a “should have” one.

“Safety is, in my view, not taken sufficiently significantly in DeFi,” he mentioned.

The rise in demand for crypto safety auditors has seen a plethora of “for rent” advertisements throughout the business.

In response to job ads posted on Cryptocurrency Jobs,blockchain audit corporations largely search for skilled programmers with an understanding of blockchain know-how, cybersecurity, and cryptography.

Whereas most safety audit salaries fall throughout the $100,000 – $250,000 vary, some corporations are prepared to pay upwards of $430,000 per yr, in response to Web3.profession’s job board.

Crypto recruitment agency Plexus Useful resource Options Zeth Couceiro made an identical remark to Bloomberg, noting that in some circumstances, blockchain safety auditors have been raking as much as $400,000 yearly.

Couceiro added that these auditors are inclined to make about 20% greater than Solidity-focused builders, which is the most well-liked programming language used to deploy good contracts on Ethereum and different Ethereum Digital Machine (EVM) suitable blockchains.

What is a brilliant contract safety audit? A newbie’s information

Among the many high vulnerabilitiesthat safety auditors search for in good contracts embrace timestamp dependency, reentrancy assaults, random quantity vulnerability, and spelling errors.

The Bloomberg report famous that enterprise capital companies have already poured $257 million into crypto safety audit corporations this yr, which is up 38.9% from all of 2021, in response to CB insights.