Secure3: Decentralized Auditing Reshapes the Web3 Security Ecosystem

Author: 0xIntern

In the world of blockchain, once a protocol is launched, it does not stop, but risks such as hacker attacks, phishing scams, private key theft, and centralized operations can bring devastating blows at any time, threatening the security of on-chain environments and assets. Every year, Web3 sees asset losses amounting to hundreds of millions, with security issues emerging endlessly, becoming a significant obstacle to the large-scale application development of Web3.

The decentralization of the Web3 world has become a consensus; however, most existing auditing models still rely on centralized institutions, which have inherent centralized drawbacks. To address these issues, Secure3 has proposed an innovative solution for decentralized security auditing, striving to improve auditing efficiency, quality, and cost-effectiveness while building a more transparent and trustworthy Web3 security ecosystem.

Web3 Security Dilemma and Crisis

Blockchain technology iterates very quickly, with new projects and technologies emerging daily. Technologies such as smart contracts, consensus mechanisms, and zero-knowledge proofs are constantly evolving, posing significant challenges to Web3 security and raising higher-level requirements—security services need to quickly adapt to these changes while ensuring high quality, and auditing technologies must be agile enough to keep pace with the development of emerging technologies and ecosystems.

Although there are many Web3 security companies on the market, most of their core mechanisms are centralized and heavily reliant on internal auditors. They often need to spend a lot of time and resources training and updating the knowledge and skills of their internal teams, making it difficult for this traditional centralized model to keep up with the rapid iteration pace of Web3.

At the same time, the results of audits lack objectivity. More importantly, granting trust to centralized institutions may introduce new risks, such as audit blind spots and internal collusion. Due to resource and scale requirements, centralized audits typically invest very few personnel in a project, which makes the scope of the audit relatively narrow and difficult to comprehensively cover all potential vulnerabilities and risks, and may even lead to internal personnel misconduct, directly threatening the security of protocols and on-chain assets.

The Rise of Decentralized Auditing

To solve the trust issues caused by centralization, decentralized auditing models have emerged. Secure3 brings together global security experts and utilizes an "audit competition" approach to provide a new type of security auditing solution to meet the diverse security needs of various projects.

Innovative Operation Model of Audit Competitions

Audit competitions communityize the auditing process, allowing multiple auditors to conduct attack detection from different angles, remaining anonymously isolated from each other. Based on game theory mechanisms, this effectively prevents intentional underreporting or concealment of vulnerabilities, increasing coverage of potential vulnerabilities. Additionally, a reward mechanism similar to PoW is introduced, where auditors are rewarded based on the number, uniqueness, and severity of the issues they discover, incentivizing them to actively seek and report vulnerabilities. The historical performance of auditors also influences the projects they are assigned to, ensuring professionalism and suitability in auditing.

Audit competitions serve as the "final security exam" before a project officially goes live. Each competition is designed according to the specific needs of the project team, providing one-stop personalized services from process plans to auditor teams. Competitions can be launched in as little as 24 hours and can invite audit teams that are 5 to 50 times larger than traditional centralized auditors. A data-driven intelligent matching system identifies suitable auditor teams for each project, enhancing the accuracy of reviews and security coverage.

In other words, with the same resources invested, project teams can enjoy the services of 5 to 50 auditors at Secure3, obtaining more comprehensive and high-quality security coverage—efficient, high-quality, and cost-effective.

Community Power to Co-Construct a New Audit Paradigm

Community co-construction is crucial for audit competitions. The Secure3 community already has nearly 500 audit experts and is continuously expanding. Through data analysis, dynamic incentive models, and intelligent matching systems, the professionalism of community services is ensured.

On one hand, by mining, cleaning, and analyzing auditors' performance data, including the vulnerabilities they submit, severity levels, audit speed, and accuracy, Secure3 introduces a dynamic incentive model where auditors' rewards are directly linked to their performance. A real-time feedback system allows auditors to understand their audit effectiveness and rankings at any time, driving self-improvement and enhancement. On the other hand, the intelligent matching system can analyze in advance which auditor is suitable for which project based on the auditors' expertise and historical performance, as well as the project team's needs, ensuring that each project receives tailored and comprehensive audit services.

Open and Transparent Quality Control Mechanism

Secure3's audit community has a strict admission system; only auditors who pass background checks and technical assessments can participate in audit competitions. The auditing process is entirely community-driven, with every audit issue raised and result reviewed relying on active participation from the audit community, ensuring that every issue can be widely discussed and fairly handled. Every step of the audit process is also made public to all participants, allowing everyone to clearly understand the specific steps of the audit and the evaluation methods of the results.

Moreover, Secure3 adopts a completely transparent reward mechanism, with all distribution standards and processes being public. For example, high-risk vulnerability rewards are significantly higher, and auditors who independently find vulnerabilities do not need to share their rewards with others. Every participant and project team can clearly see how rewards are distributed based on performance, ensuring fairness in reward allocation. Through a decentralized governance model, different voices and feedback from the community can also be understood, particularly in handling contentious vulnerability submissions, reducing biases brought by centralized power.

Secure3 is also the industry's first auditing platform to standardize the abstract classification of vulnerability submissions, ensuring clarity and comprehensiveness of vulnerability standards. These measures not only enhance the audit community's trust in project protocols but also ensure that each project receives comprehensive and trustworthy security services.
Maximizing Security

Achieving 100% security in any project is very challenging. Secure3's goal is to maximize security with limited investment. This is also the intention behind introducing multi-party competitions, revenue sharing based on results, and establishing public standards, aimed at solving the inefficiencies and trust issues caused by centralization.

In addition to avoiding issues as much as possible beforehand, actively responding, reviewing processes, and improving standards are also important protective measures. As a decentralized security platform, building an excellent audit community and a sound accountability system is crucial, as Secure3's trust directly relies on this. Secure3's motivation comes from a sense of responsibility to the community and clients, with a strong incentive to oversee the entire community, ensuring a transparent and responsible auditing process, unlike centralized institutions that are easily influenced by conflicts of interest.

As of now, Secure3 has successfully completed over 200 audit competitions, safeguarding various project teams, which also proves the effectiveness and reliability of the model. The results and feedback from each audit competition provide valuable data for improvement and enhancement, optimizing processes and tools to address the ever-changing security challenges and help provide higher-quality security services.

Audit Competitions: A Market-Validated High-Cost-Performance Choice

Secure3's audit competitions have provided security guarantees for numerous fields, including DeFi, DePIN, GameFi, Layer 1, and Layer 2 infrastructure. Many leading projects, including Mantle, Polkadot, zkSync, IoTeX, dappOS, and zkLink, have utilized audit competition services and given high praise and feedback on the model. The choices and practices of these teams also validate the advantages of the audit competition model in terms of quality and efficiency.

Compared to the high costs of traditional audits, the audit competition model can achieve super high cost-performance for clients by improving the input-output ratio. Unlike centralized companies that require a large number of personnel and operational costs, the platform model effectively reduces these costs. Secure3's model ensures that auditors can earn the vast majority of client payments, thereby ensuring that more funds are actually used to enhance security. Through platformization and intelligent operations, not only is the security efficiency of client payments improved, but it also ensures that clients' investments yield greater returns and higher security guarantees.

Decentralized Auditing Leads a New Paradigm for Web3 Security

Refining products and optimizing services have always been Secure3's top priorities. By continuously improving the auditing process and introducing diversified security tools such as AI auditing and on-chain monitoring, clients can efficiently obtain high-quality audit reports by simply submitting their needs without worrying about security and trust issues. This agile and efficient service experience is the essence of Secure3's services.
At the same time, Secure3 is also continuously building the audit community, attracting more auditors with diverse skills and backgrounds, harnessing the power and wisdom of the community to further enhance the quality and coverage of security services.

Although the concept of decentralized auditing is still relatively niche, Secure3 is committed to promoting its development, aiming to help more projects, teams, and developers gradually understand, accept, and adopt this cutting-edge security service model. Through these efforts, Secure3 hopes to ensure security in a decentralized manner in a decentralized world, jointly building a more efficient, trustworthy, and transparent Web3 security ecosystem.