In addition to releasing its software for community review, ChronoBank has enlisted the help of the world’s #1 smart contracts expert to audit its code.

Peter Vessenes is well-known in the bitcoin and Ethereum communities and is recognised as perhaps the foremost authority on the smart contracts security. The researcher was the first to draw public attention to the vulnerability in The DAO, Ethereum’s flagship application, that saw tens of millions of dollars of Ether siphoned off.

On that occasion, despite warnings, developers did not act quickly enough to prevent the exploit — a situation that ended with a controversial hardfork that split both the Ethereum blockchain and the community in two.

“I’m very pleased to have the New Alchemy team working with Chronobank on their smart contract security audit”, said Peter Vessenes, Managing Director of New Alchemy. “Chronobank has put immense effort into launching both TIME and the labor hour contracts and related services. Blockchains need more stable coins, and we are looking forward to seeing what sort of success labor-hours and TIME achieve in the marketplace.” New Alchemy will audit the entire stable of Chronobank smart contracts, looking for game theoretic and security vulnerabilities to the underlying code.

‘The message is very clear,’ comments Sergei Sergienko, CEO of ChronoBank. ‘If the software is out in the wild and is being used, it may already be too late to fix by the time the vulnerability is located. In fact, even the act of exposing the flaw might be enough to alert an attacker, with catastrophic consequences.’

Security the priority

Smart contracts are an exciting area of blockchain application, but are still at a relatively early point in their development. ‘We are doing absolutely everything possible to ensure security for our investors,’ says Sergienko. ‘Smart contracts can’t exactly be hacked; that’s not what happened with The DAO. Rather, they acted precisely as they were designed to act. The attacker worked within the rules, but he used them to bring about an outcome undesirable for the holders. We recognise both the rigidity and the complexity of smart contracts, and are prepared to work with the very best security researchers to ensure that our code functions exactly as we intend, without the kind of loopholes that have proven so detrimental to other projects.’

ChronoBank’s bounty programme is still open, with rewards being offered to members of the community who can uncover replicable bugs in the project’s code. The bounty programme will remain active until the end of the ICO, at 23:59 on 14 February.

To find out more about ChronoBank or to invest in the ICO, visit www.ChronoBank.io.