New hires, decentralized protocol progress, web tool updates, business developments and more — here’s what’s going on at Quantstamp recently:

Quantstamp Team Updates

Quantstamp is founded on research and experience in academia, and we pride ourselves on our team members academic achievements and research contributions.

Our very own Ed Zulkoski, Senior Security Engineer, has recently successfully defended his thesis on SAT solvers* and gained his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Ed has been with us from the very beginning and we are happy for his achievement.

Last Thursday, the University of Waterloo recognized Martin, our Sr. Research Engineer through BDL, for receiving the best paper award at ISAAC 2017 (International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation). ISAAC is a top-tier venue for publishing research results in algorithms, data structures, game theory, cryptography, graph theory, and related topics. The recognition was held as part of the inaugural Wes Graham Research Symposium, an important event at the University of Waterloo celebrating innovative researchers.

*SAT and SMT solvers form the backbone for many automated bug-finding tools such as those used by Quantstamp

New Hires

We’ve added a spate of new team members recently to push our protocol and product development, as well as improve our ability to perform audits. We’ve added a talented engineer, two new developers for our web product team in New York, as well as an all-star intern who will help support our auditing efforts.

Yohei Oka joined us last week as Forward Deployed Engineer out of the Tokyo Office. Yohei went to Harvard University for Computer Science, and has previously worked as a Software Engineer at Amazon, Senior Software Engineer at software startup Jana, and interned at Google.

Austin Guest is a tenacious full-stack problem-solver with a passion for clean design and security. He has a track record of building cohesive teams, and shipping reliable, maintainable code on deadline. Austin worked with Quantstamp during our Y-combinator sprint as a contractor, and we’re happy to have him join us now full time as senior software engineer out of New York. He will be working on our web team.

James Vaughan joins Austin on the web team out of New York. James has ample full-stack web development experience and helped us during the YC demo-day code sprint. He is currently a Masters student in Computer Science at Georgia tech.

Nadir Akhtar is joining us as an intern at the San Francisco office. Nadir is president of Blockchain at Berkeley, a student-run organization which does education, consulting and research into blockchain. He is currently completing his Bachelors in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, and he will be helping the team with audits.

We are continuing to hire for engineer and UX designer positions — if you are interested, please apply on our careers page.

Quantstamp Protocol Progress

Senior Research Engineer Vajih Montaghami at Quantstamp partner BDL’s Toronto Office

Quantstamp’s core mission is to make smart contracts more secure. Central to that is our development of a decentralized protocol that will trustlessly audit smart contracts.

We currently have a working proof-of-concept of the protocol running on testnet. You can see it in action here, and submit smart contracts to it here.

We are now working on the betanet iteration of our protocol which is targeted for completion in late August. For this iteration, we aim to develop a permissioned network of whitelisted auditing nodes. Although this iteration is permissioned, it will help us troubleshoot issues within the protocol before we move on to our next phase. This iteration will bring us closer to our goal of a scalable, decentralized and automated auditing solution.

Here is some of the latest progress we’ve made during this code sprint:

Finished the alpha version of the Mythril plugin — this is the wrapper to the Mythril analyzer which allows it to interface with the auditing nodes in our protocol.

Continued to work to improve robustness of the analyzer interface. This is the interface which automated tools like Oyente and Mythril plug-in to.

Made progress on various core features of the decentralized QSP protocol — including audit requests distribution, refund functionality, and handling timeouts.

We improved the test coverage of our auditing nodes to 87%. Increased test coverage means our testing suite covers more of the code and possible scenarios that the auditing node will encounter — allowing us to do better error checking and ensure robust auditing nodes in this test mode.

We continued development on our network monitoring tool. Besides back-end development, we containerized it and have now deployed it in our development environment. This monitoring tool helps us track the health and status of auditing nodes as well as smart contract states to improve the quality of service of the network.

Improved the upgradability of the QSP audit contract by separating the data storage from business logic.

Web-based Smart Contract Analyzer

Our web-based smart contract analyzer MVP was developed during our time at Y-Combinator, and allows anyone to request an automated security analysis of a smart contract for a small amount of QSP.

In the past few weeks we’ve made progress on a new feature which will allow users to submit updated versions of their smart contract as it is being developed.

This will allow developers to easily check and track the security of their code over multiple versions as they develop a smart contract over time, and make sure their contract is ok before it is deployed to mainnet. We’ve also made architectural improvements to improve the upgradeability of the tool.

Audits

Recently, we completed full-service audits of token contracts for Mainframe — a decentralized messaging and communications protocol, as well as an audit of token contracts for Disciplina — a blockchain for verified personal profiles based on academic and professional achievements.

In addition to the above, we helped Yggdrash, a multi-chain blockchain, audit their new smart contracts following their recent hard fork.

Our auditing work contributes to our knowledge-base of smart contract security vulnerabilities, and helps our mission to boost the security of the blockchain ecosystem.

Quantstamp in Japan

Head of APAC Kei Oda educates legislators at Plug and Play Japan on smart contracts

We’ve been very active recently in Japan, where we have seen strong interest from Japanese enterprises for our services and technology.

As announced last week, we’ve been accepted into the first batch of Plug and Play Japan. Plug and Play Japan is a startup accelerator that provides direct access to some of Japan’s largest enterprises including Nissan, Panasonic, and MUFG.

CEO Richard Ma sits down with popular Japanese gaming magazine Gamewith

Popular Japanese gaming magazine Gamewith recently interviewed our CEO Richard Ma, where he talked about the importance of security for Dapps, as well as his vision of mainstream blockchain adoption.

Blockchain Advocacy

Our VP of Strategy Olga V. Mack in Sacramento

Quantstamp and about 20 other blockchain projects joined Block Advocacy group in Sacramento to educate California legislators about blockchain technology. The goal is to keep an ongoing conversation, share knowledge, and help pass informed laws.

Community Outreach and Events

Web team manager Micaela Neus speaks about smart contract security at BuildEth

A number of Quantstamp team members attended BuildEth conference in San Francisco, where our Asst. Product Manager Micaela Neus was invited to speak about “Top Security Patterns for Smart Contract Developers.”

Korea Blockchain Week

CTO Steven Stewart presents at BlockParty in Seoul

We are currently in Korea for Blockchain Week, which will take place from July 16th to 20th. We sponsored and spoke recently at Block Party, a 3 day bootcamp in Seoul for DApp developers. Attendees were top students from Korean universities and it was a great opportunity to introduce the next generation of DApp developers to secure smart contract development.

In addition to Block Party, we also held a meetup event through KryptoSeoul where we introduced Quantstamp, our technology, and the problems we’re trying to solve in smart contract security. You can see video of the meetup here.

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