Blockchain security startup CertiK has raised an additional $80 million in fresh funding to expand its smart contract auditing and tracking services.

This Series B2 round was led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from investors Tiger Global, Coatue Management, GL Ventures and Lightspeed Ventures. It’s the third such round of capital raised by the company within four months, altogether totaling just over $140 million.

CertiK’s products and services to audit and trace smart contracts on distributed ledger blockchain protocols. Smart contracts are pieces of self-executing code that can transfer valuable assets when certain conditions are met. Errors and bugs in smart contracts can cause monetary losses, so detecting and correcting them before they happen can save time and money.

“In 2020 the blockchain space lost around $500 million dollars to exploits and bugs,” Professor Ronghui Gu, co-founder of CertiK, told SiliconANGLE in an interview. “That number tripled during 2021 to reach almost $1.3 billion being lost due to software errors. So, we can see that becoming a bottleneck for the industry – especially for those seeking to embrace blockchain technology. That’s why we’re here: to protect and secure crypto assets and networks.”

This is in line with data collected by The Block research, which also estimated $1.4 billion in losses in 2021. According to the same research, a little over half of the amount taken, almost $760 million in assets, had been returned.

The ever-increasing adoption of decentralized finance, which depends heavily on smart contracts, has fueled massive demand for CertiK’s products and services. To date, the company has protected over $211 billion worth of digital assets and detected over 31,000 vulnerabilities in blockchain code for more than 1,800 clients.

“Smart contract auditing and verification are the first steps in a blockchain security service,” said Gu, speaking to the future of the company’s products. “CertiK’s goal will be to develop more SaaS products to provide additional security benefits for clients. This includes security auditing, formal verification, monitoring, detection, as well as protection of client blockchain and smart contracts.”

To augment CertiK’s smart contract auditing services, CertiK launched Skynet, an active-monitoring platform. Using Skynet smart contracts and blockchains can be monitored in real-time against sophisticated security threats. It uses artificial intelligence and large amounts of both on-chain and off-chain data in order to achieve that goal.

Clients signed up for Skynet receive real-time alerts when threats or vulnerabilities are detected in their smart contracts or blockchain protocols so that they can swiftly move to correct them.

With the information gathered from Skynet, CertiK also provides what it calls a “security score” where it publicly ranks blockchain projects on its Security Leaderboard. This leaderboard provides a way for the public to know how secure different blockchain and DeFi protocols are before they buy or trade tokens.

CertiK intends to use the new funding to continue to expand its current products and services including its newest service called SkyTrace, a graphical trace tool for tracking suspicious activity between Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain wallets. It is currently a free tool intended to reduce the risk of fraud or money laundering activity.

Gu told SiliconANGLE blockchain security is a multifaceted problem that needs to be approached from the angle of trust and transparency. Ideally, blockchain technology should provide increased trust between counterparties and when code has errors, exploits or vulnerabilities at release it can erode that.

“Our short-term goal is to develop and release a set of new services and solutions and provide a one-stop cybersecurity service to crypto projects and companies,” Gu said. “As for our long-term vision, we want to help the community rebuild trust. Blockchain is about trust. We want to use our dataset and tools to reveal trust and security in the blockchain industry and become the most trusted blockchain security provider for the blockchain space.”

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