Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Living on Blockchain. Today we are speaking to Michael Pearl. Michael Pearl is the VP GTM Strategy at Cyvers.ai. He also hosts a podcast called Freen Descent.
He’s also coming up with a new podcast soon. And at Cyber they focus on post-deployment security in Web3, which is a bit of a kicker because usually when you hear security and cybersecurity in Web3, it’s usually audits and smart contract auditing that comes to mind. This was a very insightful conversation because this shows a different aspect of the entire security issue with Web3, especially because as we move forward and this ecosystem matures, security becomes even more and more pertinent.
So this is a conversation I really want you guys to pay attention to and here I can’t wait for you guys to hear this. Let’s deep dive right in. Hi Michael, thank you so much for making the time to speak to me today.
How are you doing? Hey Tarusha, thanks for having me. All good. Brilliant.
So for our listeners, can you tell us a little about yourself and how you got into Web3? Just a little about, you know, your journey so far and what has it been like? Yeah, so I got into Web3 a little more than 10 years ago. Basically I was always interested in fintech and technology and so on. Back then I was an editor at a major newspaper in Israel, Business Daily, and I got kind of dragged into that because I went to several meetups.
Back then it was like very small meetups, like four guys in a room, trying to, you know, claim that Bitcoin is going to be the next big thing. And actually I was really, I’m really sorry that I wasn’t more convinced back then and I could have bought much more Bitcoin. But I became interested in that and then gradually as the industry became, you know, more appealing in a sense that, you know, new things emerged.
I remember when Ethereum was introduced and then you had the entire, you know, token economy and then DeFi came along, NFTs, and, you know, the rest is history. So basically I gradually got dragged into that. And about, I think seven years ago, I started being more hands-on, started working in the industry and becoming accustomed with the executives in the industry.
So it was a gradual process, but I have to say that now I’m all in and it’s a fascinating industry. And I think that we all have a lot to learn and the future is really bright for what we’re about to see with respect to Web3. Right.
You know, I totally concur. So your induction into Web3, so to say, was gradual. And, you know, over the years, you’ve had a podcast and now you are working with Cyvers.
Can you tell us a little about the podcast as well as your role with Cyvers? Yeah, so I started a small podcast in Israel, kind of introducing people from the local industry in Hebrew. Actually, now we’re in the process of building our own podcast within Cyvers, given the fact that we’re a market leader in everything that has to do with Web3 security, compliance, risk mitigation. We feel that we have a lot to share with the industry and we would very much like to educate the industry about the dangers that Web3 has and how to mitigate them, how to go about them, how to prevent yourself from being hacked or scammed and so on, whether it’s for businesses or for individuals.
And that’s why we’re starting our own podcast right now, interviewing industry leaders, executives. So stay tuned for that. We’re going to make it public very soon.
So that sounds wonderful. Can you tell me a little more about the kind of, you know, you are doing this in Hebrew, right? You mentioned that. So what is the kind of audience that you’re really trying to perhaps conquer with this particular kind of content? And what is the kind of interest of people who are not perhaps builders, but potential users in Israel for Web3? Can you give us a little insight about that? So Israel is quite a hub in terms of Web3.
There are a lot of, sorry? Right. I mean, I’m aware that it’s quite a tech hub and, you know, a startup hub. And there are a lot of wonderful builders that are creating great solutions out of Israel.
But what about users? Do you see the kind of penetration of Web3 solutions within the general populace as well? Do they understand the technologies as well? So in terms of the retail penetration, it’s not as much as you would see in other countries. First of all, due to the regulation, the regulation here is very, very stringent. And you don’t see that many companies that are actually able to set up shop in Israel and to allow users to actually come on board.
Unfortunately, I really would wish that the regulation here would be much more straightforward and maybe more comprehensive and understanding, like, let’s say, in Dubai, for instance, or in Singapore, for instance. Having said that, there are a lot of crypto users here in Israel. People are very tech savvy, and people are looking into new technologies all the time.
So you have some early adopters here. And also, given the fact that there’s so many, you know, prominent Web3 companies in Israel, like Fireblocks, like Kitor, for instance, companies that are now international, but their origin is from Israel. So that also pushes many people to become involved.
So there’s quite a crypto community here in Israel, both retail and B2B. Okay, that sounds wonderful. And now, you know, moving on from perhaps the populace then and the use cases there, because I think everybody knows that, you know, Israel has produced some, as I mentioned earlier, has produced some wonderful solutions.
And the populace seems to be very, very tech savvy. But with stringent regulation, which I think is a good balance, that, you know, with stringent regulations, bad pairs usually don’t make a headache. So that’s good.
But moving from there, can you tell us a little about your role at Cyvers? And what are you doing there as the VP of GTM? So perhaps just two words about Cyvers. I mentioned earlier that Cyvers is the leader in web-free cybersecurity and risk mitigation. Cyvers basically provides security on the runtime level, meaning that we’re not an auditing company.
After you’ve done all your auditing and you launch a product, we’re helping you to monitor it in real time, monitor your assets, whether it’s smart contracts or wallets, and to make sure that you or your client will not get hacked, scammed, rug pulled, and so on. So that’s in a nutshell what we do. My role in the company is to take care of the business and the marketing part of things in terms of business development, marketing, obviously, all the different ways that we do marketing.
Primarily, we have a very, very prominent and popular Twitter account, which is called Cyvers Alerts, where we publish only a small fragment of the hacks and the scams that we get. And that’s obviously a very good source for us to communicate with the industry, to educate the industry. And that’s some of the things that we’re involved with.
Also, all the business development, the partnerships, the sales of the company, that’s under my supervision. Okay, wonderful. So it’s a cybersecurity company with a bit of a twist, because whenever you say cybersecurity in Web3, I think everybody seems to think that, okay, it’s a company that provides security audits.
But you said that this is more of an end-to-end sort of a solution. You guys are able to give real-time data for assets that are being held by an individual or entity. Is my understanding correct? Yeah, one of the biggest misconceptions, I think, now in the industry, and I actually wrote an op-ed about it that is going to be published very soon, that people perceive, and I remember this from the, let’s say, 2017, 2018 days when ICOs were a very popular service.
And I remember when basically nobody cared about security. And any type of tool or service that you would have used to provide security to your project would be just to audit the code at the pre-deployment stage. And people thought it’s going to give you several bullets, basically audit your code, launch your smart contract, and that’s it.
But actually, from data that we have, nine out of 10 smart contracts that were hacked were pre-audited. So clearly, auditing is important and something that you need to tick the box and have much respect for auditing companies. Some of our best partners are auditing companies.
That’s not sufficient. At the end of the day, you need to have real-time monitoring, and that’s exactly what we do. We track 10 different blockchains 24-7, block by block, and we spot anomalies.
And eventually, each anomaly gets examined by our AI models. We have five different AI models that are examining every anomaly, label it. So for instance, if we see some suspicious activity in a transaction, we can tell immediately that it’s a wallet access control violation, basically a dual wallet.
And we can even classify it as which type of bridge it is. And we can notify in real time, if it’s our client, obviously, we can notify in real time that this is happening. And oftentimes, we can prevent it altogether.
We even have preemptive measures, meaning that we can spot that one of our clients was flagged as a potential victim. And we can even give them the heads up and prevent the hack before it’s happening at the preparation stage, which is, in my opinion, very cool. And we are doing this constantly on a daily basis, saving millions and millions of funds.
And obviously, our goal is to bring the losses to Web3, which I think this year will reach about more than $2 billion. Unfortunately, our goal is to bring it to close to zero. And I believe that if the project founders and the corporate will be diligent, and will utilize solutions such as ours, I believe that it’s possible.
Right. Yeah, I think it is very, very pertinent what you guys are doing. So you know, you guys focus on post deployment security, like you mentioned, in you already explained what it kind of entails.
Can you tell us in perhaps simpler, like if you had to give a USB, okay, for Cyvers and maybe in a jargon free manner, so that any and every person listening on the podcast can understand it? How would you summarize it? How would you explain why this is crucial? So very simply put, imagine that, you know, your assets, whether it’s a wallet or a smart contract, any anything that holds funds, essentially, imagine this is if it’s your house, right? So if you have something valuable in your house, perhaps, you know, just locking it with a key is not sufficient. Perhaps you would like to have something more real time to know if somebody is, you know, trying to breach the security of your house, obviously, would have cameras, maybe you will have some sensors, maybe you will have an app that tells you, listen, somebody’s trying to get into your house. So if you take this analogy and apply it into digital assets, that’s basically what we do.
Imagine that we have sensors all over your house, so to speak, we have cameras, we have many different ways of, you know, spotting attempts to break into your house. And we also have a very powerful AI mechanism that is able to tell, you know, whether it’s just a dog walking outside of your house, or a person that is actually trying to break in. So I wouldn’t bother you with just false alerts all the time.
So if you have this powerful tool, and you know that when you get the call from us, or the call or the message, metaphorically speaking, indeed, you know, some someone is trying to break into your house, then you will take it seriously. And you can, you know, apply safety mechanisms to prevent this person from breaking into your house. So I hope that this analogy is helpful.
Yeah, I think it’s a wonderful analogy. It’ll give a good idea for why you know what you guys are doing and why it is so pertinent to really take on your services, if somebody is building and creating smart contracts, and their work is dependent on that. So that was a great analogy.
Thank you for sharing that. Can you, you know, this is, this is interesting, because, you know, not a lot of people are doing this, right. And you don’t see a lot of platforms that are giving post deployment security.
And in a, you know, manner, which is really comprehensive as well. Can you can you tell us a little about the kind of what are the kind of threats that you see and most common vulnerabilities that you identify and mitigate using the platform? You mentioned that, you know, you guys use AI as well. So can you elaborate a little on that? It’d be great if you could give us some examples.
Yeah. Yeah. So very simply put, again, if we simplify the end of the day, hackers or scammers, they are after primarily funds, right.
So they’re looking for ways of how to steal funds, and obviously, big wallets with big amounts of crypto in them, or smart contracts that are holding funds, you know, either if it’s a pool that serves DEXs or lending protocols, at the end of the day, the hackers see it as a piggy bank, you know, that they want to, to intrude and to steal money from. And all the rest is just the many different and creative ways of the hackers are using to steal those funds. So obviously, you know, if we’re talking about wallets or smart contracts, the most straightforward way would be just to infiltrate those assets and to steal the funds.
But there are more sophisticated ways, just to give you an example. Only recently, we spotted a hack in LiFi protocol, which essentially, the hack there was not on the front of the protocol itself, but on the front of the client of the protocol. Because as your listeners probably know, when you interact with a DeFi protocol, you give them an allowance, basically a permission to access your wallet.
So they use this permission to drain the wallets of the client. And then we had to do an entire process of talking to, you know, most companies that we’re in touch with in the industry, primarily wallets, telling them, guys, listen, talk to your clients and tell them to revoke their permissions, because we wanted to mitigate this situation. So that’s, you know, just one example of a slightly more sophisticated way to steal funds from wallets or smart contracts.
And same thing with scams, you know, just to give you an example, about three months ago, we uncovered the biggest address poisoning in history. So address poisoning, in principle, to simplify it with me tricking you to send money to the wrong address, right? So you think that you’re sending money to a friend, to a colleague, and so on. But eventually, you’re saving the money to me, oftentimes, without even knowing that in real time.
So we uncovered a $68 million scam of address poisoning. And again, scammers have the same goal, just to steal your money. And what we see in the recent year or so, excuse me, what we see in the recent year or so is that those hackers and scammers are becoming very, very sophisticated.
Oftentimes, there’s a some sort of a conglomerate or even a country behind those scammers. And we see that, you know, for such creative and sophisticated you know, minds, you need always to always be one, one step ahead of the curve to make sure that they don’t succeed. Okay, that’s, that’s wonderful.
I think, you know, the way you kind of put it in the examples that you’ve given, I think will give a real good idea. And I think convince a lot more people about why post deployment security is very, very important in the help your services can perhaps provide. You know, you mentioned that you, your platform leverages, obviously advanced analytics to provide detailed security reports and insights.
So what kind of metrics are usually included in these reports? So perhaps I’ll explain a little bit about the system, and then you can better understand the output. So essentially, what we did, we utilized our own proprietary AI mechanisms, we build our own machine learning engines. And to simplify what they did is to study 1000s and 1000s of different hacks and scams, and basically breaking them down into all the ingredients and all the, you know, timeline of how each individual hack works, and what’s the behavior of the hackers and the scammers.
And then once you realize that once you learn it on a very deep level, you can analyze any transaction on the blockchain. And then when you see the slightest hint, that this transaction resembles a transaction that was involved in an incident that you already studied, you this can ring a bell, and then you can, you know, go deeper and analyze it deeper. And then you can really tell if it’s a hack or a scam, or not.
And what type of hack and scam is it and how to handle this. Now, all the process that I illustrated, it’s basically something that takes milliseconds. So we have a very, very low latency.
And essentially, all this analysis takes, you know, no time. So the time where when the hacker initiated their, you know, malicious plot, and until the client actually knows that he’s, he’s being hacked, it’s something that is momentarily, right. So that’s the way it works.
Essentially, we spot typical behaviors of hackers, you know, when I say behavior, obviously, I don’t mean like a manual, you know, human like behavior, we’re talking about digital footprint, essentially. And at the end of the day, we can, you know, spot if this behavior is malicious, what type of malicious behavior is it, and how to handle it. Unfortunately, you know, when the companies that are not our clients, we’re still trying to help them.
But oftentimes, it’s too late. Because if you want to get notified in real time, or even ahead of time, you have to, you know, work with us, and you have to have some sort of a relationship with us, because we have a security operation center that can notify you in real time. But even with companies that are not our clients, we’re trying to help them kind of in the post-mortem phase, to figure out what went wrong, how they can prevent it, maybe how they can recover some of the funds.
You know, just to give you an example, we were the first and the only ones to detect only recently, one of the largest hacks in history, which was the WazirX hack. WazirX, for those who don’t know, it’s, I think, the largest crypto exchange in India. And they were hacked and some 20, sorry, some $235 million were stolen in a very, very fast process, right? And they had a lot of mechanisms put in place, you know, just to bring you back to my analogy of, you know, keys for your house, right? So they had a multisig wallet that they were working with a custodian, but eventually nothing helped.
And we were the ones that broke the news for them, unfortunately. And they were hacked and $235 million were stolen. And we helped them to mitigate the situation.
You know, unfortunately, when the money is gone, it’s already very hard to recover it. There are some ways of doing that. And here, knowledge is key, right? You need to understand where the money went to, which wallets were involved in that.
And with respect to money laundering, you know, and eventually funneling the money to their pockets, the hackers are also very sophisticated. You know, it doesn’t just, you know, lie in one wallet. They usually go cross-chain, cross-token, swap it, go through bridges to try to conceal the origin of the money.
But obviously, our mechanisms are able to track the money. And even if we go through several steps, we can still see where the money went to. Okay, well, wonderful.
So this is like, you know, you’ve talked about all the examples, and you’ve given me the data and the metrics that are included in these reports. How do you ensure that these insights generated are actionable and actually beneficial for the stakeholders in the Web3 ecosystem? Is there something, because you know, you guys have been around for a while, is there something that you do on that end as well? Because I do understand that, you know, your work is about identifying and perhaps letting these guys know where the vulnerabilities are, and making them aware so that, you know, some mitigation can take place. But how do you make these reports actionable in nature? Yeah, so it’s a very good question.
First of all, to make sure that these are not just, you know, signals, alerts, and reports, as you said, we need to work with a company. And what we do usually when we start working with companies and partnering with them is that we help them set up mechanisms for real-time disaster management, right? So at the end of the day, being notified is one thing, but if you want to take actionable items, you need to prepare yourself, right? So companies are really, you know, not aware of that usually. And they, like, you would be surprised, even big corporations, they say, listen, when we get to the bridge, we’ll cross it.
But it’s not the right way to go, right? You need to prepare yourself for a situation where you might be hacked. And then, you know, there are many different ways of handling this, you know, whether types of circuit breakers, pause mechanisms, or just funneling money from one wallet to a safer wallet. And when you have such a process, such a protocol put in place, teamed with our alerting mechanism, then you can be, to a very high extent, you can be immune to hacks and scams.
Because you have the alerting mechanism in real-time, or even before that, right? Yeah, even in a preemptive manner. And you have the response mechanism. And this whole comprehensive, holistic approach basically allows you to prevent hacks from being executed.
Right. Okay. That’s good.
Because I think what happens is, in terms of, like, the security, the cybersecurity bubble that we have in our own ecosystem, a lot of, there is a lot of data, right? I think a lot of data is available anyway, very freely, because of the very nature of the technology. But there are very, there’s very little, at times, very little motivation. And at times, very little understanding of how to sort of resolve these, you know, these issues at hand.
So that kind of becomes like a bit of a bit of a roadblock, I think, in moving forward. But, you know, what you guys are doing is going to perhaps dismantle that as well, a little bit. So that is absolutely wonderful.
Can you tell us a little about the kind of… By the way, just to refer to what you’re saying, I think that you’re very right in pointing that out. I think that nowadays, you know, zoom out, even from the world of Web3 and security, I think we live in an age of information where we’re flooded with information. There is no shortage of data and information.
The key here is how you organize it and parse it and what insights you can get from this information, especially in the blockchain space, where, you know, everything is presumably transparent and you have all the data in front of you. The gist here is to know how to play with the information, how to get insights from it, and the speed of things that you can do that, right? So if you can manage to create a mechanism, essentially a solution that is able to take all this information and to get insights out of it in real time, and to classify those insights, that’s, I think, the, you know, the more tricky part. And that’s what we are doing and trying to always improve.
Yeah, I think that is the tricky part, like I mentioned, you know, because I think both of us have been around for a while and in this space, and we understand that there is no dearth of information. It is just at times either the motivation or, you know, just the understanding, which is lacking and that kind of creates hurdles in making effective change, perhaps. So now, moving a little about, you know, your partnerships.
So Cyvers has partnered with industry leaders and, you know, you’ve also collaborated with folks like Realm Insurance, Inverted Investments. Can you tell us a little about these partnerships and how they enhance your security offerings? We are working with companies from, you know, from the entire gamut of the web-free industry. I think that the beauty of the solution that we have, and primarily the engine behind it, is the fact that it’s a multi-purpose engine.
So it can help all types of web-free companies. Basically, if you are doing anything on-chain and you have anything that is, you know, valuable, then you can be susceptible to hacks. And thus, we can help you with that. So we’re working with, you know, anything from DeFi projects to entire blockchains.
Just to give you an example, we’re the security partner of Linea, the LQ of ConsenSys. We’re also working with Stellar, with Artera. We have a few more blockchains coming up that we’re going to partner with.
In essence, what we’re doing is we’re providing security to the entire ecosystem. So we’re securing the blockchain itself to make sure that, you know, nobody trips the various mechanisms of the blockchain, but also the projects that are building on top of the blockchain. So essentially, we’re building a secure environment for the entire ecosystem.
We’re also working with, you mentioned, Realm Insurance, helping them with various tasks that they have with respect to their insurance processes, like underwriting, claims, and things of that sort. We’re also working with some institutional companies, primarily 21Shares, that recently joined us, helping them with their trading efforts. And not only, I mean, securing their assets, but also giving them insights for the trading efforts that they have.
Yeah, also centralized exchanges, wallets. I think that there is not, you know, one segment of the crypto industry that we’re not involved in. Hmm, okay.
So you are open to further partnerships with other deep tech platforms, like you mentioned. So if somebody is listening who wants to perhaps partner with cyvers, what is the best way to get in touch with you guys? We, first of all, if you want to learn about us, so obviously I mentioned the Twitter account that we have, and you can catch us on LinkedIn. If you want to talk about partnerships, the best way would be just to contact me.
You know, you can look me up on LinkedIn and just ping me, or, you know, send me an email, go to our website and hit the demo button. We would be more than happy to talk to interesting companies that would like to basically secure their assets and to learn more about how we can mitigate risks. So we’re definitely open for that.
Okay, wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. Now, can you tell us a little about the emerging trends and challenges in the Web3 security landscape that you think companies and users should be perhaps aware of? Obviously, this is more of a personal opinion that, you know, you might have, because you’ve been around in this space for a while.
Yeah, so first of all, you know, even before my opinion, just if you look at the basic data, so in 2023, we spotted close to $1.4 billion that were stolen. In 2024, we are already approaching the threshold of $2 billion. So it’s evident that, you know, as the industry is growing, and as the bull market continues, the interest and, you know, the efforts that the hackers put into that to, you know, get their hands on those funds, it’s also growing, right? So when you see the numbers growing, when you see Bitcoin going up, Ethereum going up, altcoins, you know, companies raising funds and so on, you can bet yourself that there is someone that is trying to, you know, maliciously basically steal those funds.
And that’s why the threat is always growing. But it’s not only quantitative, it’s also qualitative, in a sense that, as I said earlier, the creativity and the ingenuity of those hackers and scammers is also improving, right? So they are optimizing the way that they do that, you know, there’s a term called zero day attack, which is essentially, you know, a type of attack that you have never seen before. And that’s something that we’re dealing with all the time, we see new ways of stealing funds, and when you are able to lock one door, you know, they are able to go to the window and to break it to the window, going back to my analogy, right? And it’s our role to make sure that, you know, even if they go through the window, we can still, you know, spot them in real time.
So the threat is very evident, and it’s only growing. And I think that the project, you know, owners, founders, they start to gradually understand that, you know, nobody can just ignore security anymore. They need to take measures to make sure that, you know, their security will be intact.
Yeah, no, I completely agree. I think security is not something that can be overlooked, or be taken lightly in this day and age. And I think we’ve seen numerous examples of how, you know, that can really, you know, cost the founders, if they do take it lightly in the long term.
Can you tell us a little and shed some light over the role of AI and perhaps ML in, you know, and how it’s evolving in the context of Web3 security specifically? I think it has to do a lot with what we talked about, you know, the challenge of making sense of all this information flood that we’re experiencing. So at the end of the day, if you want to properly assess all the information, you know, think about it, there are millions of transactions on the blockchain. And, you know, if you multiply by the different blockchains, then we’re talking about, you know, even bigger numbers.
And at the end of the day, how can you make sense of which transaction is just a, you know, a regular, benevolent transaction of me sending funds to a friend, to a colleague, to, you know, a service provider, or a malicious transaction that essentially somebody is stealing funds, or draining wallets or smart contracts, and so on. So you need to have an automated mechanism that is not only automated in a sense that, you know, it’s just an algorithm, it needs to have some sort of an intelligence of its own, to basically figure out which transaction is malevolent, and what type of malevolent activity is that, right, to make sure that they can properly address that. So I think that here, the use of AI is becoming crucial.
Because at the pace of things that we’re talking about, and the amount of data that you’re processing, this is not something that you can do without AI. Right, absolutely. I think, you know, usually, I hear so many people say the same thing that, okay, AI is out there to get their jobs.
And I don’t believe that. I think that, you know, you can actually get better at what you do if you’re using, you know, AI as a helpful agent. And you know, perhaps the jobs that AI will take over are the ones that need to be taken over, in a way, this might sound very privileged, but those are perhaps admin tasks, right? I think you’ll always need people and that human touch to accomplish great things.
And like you said, that, you know, AI will help like with the kind of amount of data that decentralized technologies and all of these smart contracts, this entire ecosystem generates, if you really want to get it right, and do this in an efficient manner, add efficiency into that entire equation, AI is going to be like a helpful friend there. And I think with leaving more time on our hands, right, then you know, we can actually build better things and do greater work, perhaps. That is just my perspective.
And I would love to know what you think about this as well. Yeah, I think that at the end of the day, when you have a technology that has already, you know, matured, and that is already operational, I think that, you know, you can put the genie back into the bottle. So it doesn’t matter, you know, what we think on the political level, it doesn’t matter how regulators think, at the end of the day, the technology is out there.
And if the technology is efficient, if the technology helps you to further your goals, people will use that. And if you don’t use that, then your competitors will use that. And eventually, you will stay behind.
So I think that AI, it is what it is, right? I mean, you cannot ignore it. And I think that nowadays, you cannot also, you know, refrain from using it. Right.
Yeah, I think that is that is a wonderful way to put it. The genie is out of the bottle, there is no way to put it back in. And, you know, might as well be a part of the bandwagon and be a part of on or, you know, be aboard that train.
Otherwise, you would be left behind. So those are some quotable quotes from there. Now, coming back to cyber a little bit, can you tell us a little about the next big milestone that you guys are looking at? And then, you know, we can perhaps talk a little about your personal insights about the ecosystem at large.
So with respect to cyvers now, obviously, beyond just optimizing the system, which is very important, again, to stay ahead of the curve, you need to always optimize the AI mechanisms and the interface. But beyond that, we’re looking into penetrating other blockchains as well. So we’re going to add Bitcoin very soon, which is a major milestone for us.
And we’re going to add more and more blockchains eventually to expand the scope of the security that we’re providing. Also, we’re looking, you know, every new partner that we’re working with brings a new use case, right, the new challenge that we need to solve. So obviously, as we have more and more partners joining us, we’re expanding to other fields of the industry and other use cases that we haven’t worked with before.
And obviously, this whole thing feeds into our solution because, again, the good thing about AI is that AI can learn and can, you know, optimize all the time. So each new use case, each new partner brings in more knowledge for us and basically improves the solution. Right.
Yeah, I think that is wonderful. That is something to look forward to. And I love how you guys are blending AI and, you know, with cybersecurity, with Web3 security and working with these deep tech platforms.
I think what you’re doing is wonderful. And you’re taking care of a part, which I’m going to reemphasize, post-deployment security, which is very, very important in this day and age. I think we’ve had an entire arc.
There were obviously, you know, as you mentioned in the ICO days, nobody really cared so much about security. And then they paid a heavy price for that. But then, you know, there’s some information that started trickling in and people started taking security a little more seriously.
But they were just thinking about smart contract auditing. And, yeah, and that’s that. And that’s it.
And some, you know, not thinking really about post-deployment security and the upkeep and the, you know, just the usual work that kind of goes in to make sure that, you know, it keeps scaling and it becomes better and it becomes safer. And, you know, your user funds are safe because this is a very, very dynamic space. You are somebody who has a very diverse background, you know, in terms of fintech, AI, geopolitics.
So how do you, you know, integrate all of this and into your professional as well as personal life? That is something I would love to understand. I think one of the most interesting things and what I personally like about the blockchain space is the fact that it’s so diverse, right? So I always say that, you know, if you want to be involved in blockchain, you have to be like a part-time developer, part-time lawyer because you have to understand the regulations, part-time, you know, financier because you have to understand, you know, the finances that go behind it. So I think that this is fascinating.
And that’s why I love this industry so much because it’s so diverse and you are covering so much ground in each and every use case that you’re touching, right? So you have to know all those things and you have to learn across the board, basically, just to understand, you know, how this works and how you can be involved in that. So that’s what I personally like about it. Right.
Yeah, I think that kind of takes care of my next question as well that I had to ask you, but I’ll frame it a little better and nevertheless ask you this one question that I ask everybody who comes on the show and considering we’re out of time, I think I’ll make this my penultimate before we wrap this up. You’ve been around for a while and, you know, you were working in FinTech and you are now working exclusively in WebT. What would be your suggestions for builders as well as potential users for them to start living on blockchain? I think that my best, you know, or to put it in a different way, my first recommendation would be to be curious, because if you’re not curious, then you will not be able to succeed in this industry.
You have to be curious and everything derives from curiosity. If you are curious, you will learn how things are working in the background. And if you don’t understand, you don’t have to be a developer yourself, but you have to understand the technology, you have to understand the legal framework, you have to understand the tokenomics, the marketing aspects, everything.
And if you have healthy curiosity, you will, you know, learn that, you know, either through hands-on experience or courses or just reading articles, you will find a way. But even if you’re a very successful developer and you work in, you know, in a project that is building on a specific blockchain, you might become irrelevant after a few months because the industry moves at such a quick pace. And if you don’t understand, you know, where the industry is going to, which new technologies emerge, which new legal frameworks emerge, you will not be able to stay relevant.
Yes, I think being curious and getting stuff done, I think, will get you places. And obviously making sure that you understand what you’re doing, doing your research would help, not like decentralizing for the sake of decentralizing for builders, I think, and for users themselves. Just not trying to understand, I think, end-to-end technology, but perhaps just exploring this new era of tech and just exploring the solutions, I think, is a good way to go.
Yeah, exactly. So, Michael, thank you so much once again for making the time to speak to me today. This has been a wonderful conversation.
Any parting words before we wrap this up? First of all, Tarusha, thank you so much for the lovely conversation. Again, I would urge you guys to follow us on service alerts. I’m also active on Twitter and LinkedIn.
If, you know, any one of your listeners has perhaps something interesting that they learned, you know, I really urge you guys to ping me and I would love to continue this conversation. And again, thank you so much for having me. It was a fascinating conversation and I hope that your listeners will find it also helpful and interesting.
Absolutely. I’m sure that they’ll have a lot of insights to gather from this and they’ll check out cyvers right away. They seem to be one of the better platforms providing post-deployment security.
And on that note, I’ll wrap this up. Thank you so much, Michael. Thank you.