FTX Founder Outlines Framework to Minimise Hacks

Sam Bankman-Fried, has reportedly outlined a framework for limiting the impact of the hacks and exploits that are so common within the industry. The intervention comes a few days after a hacker was able to keep half ($50m) of the roughly $100m drained from the Mango decentralised finance application. It is estimated that hackers stole up to $117 million from the Mango Markets platform, a decentralized finance (DeFi) trading platform on the Solana blockchain, via a price manipulation on the native MNGO token.

It is reported that more than $3bn has been looted from the crypto sector this year, which is set to be a record for hacking. The measures suggested by Sam Bankman-Fried include to lift the maximum bounty for attackers to $5 million and the setting of a “5-5 standard”, where hackers keep either 5 per cent of the amount they have taken from a protocol or $5m.

Will this work to improve the overall security of blockchain technologies?

In crypto, attackers are sometimes viewed as white-hat hackers who seek to expose vulnerabilities in return for a reward rather than to make malicious gains. Certainly, the onus must be on DeFi providers to discover and fix exploits before their customers lose wealth transferred and managed within the platform.