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How to Not Get Hacked in DeFi and the KERNEL Security Track

Tenderly is participating with numerous other companies in the KERNEL Security Track, stewarded by Gitcoin. Cohorts can use all features of Tenderly Pro for free during the duration of the program.

How to Not Get Hacked in DeFi and the KERNEL Security Track

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Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. Who controls the private keys, controls the protocol.
- George yRwell

Yes, I did just horrifically misquote George Orwell, but hey, there aren’t that many exciting quotes about Smart Contract security!

TL; DR: Security is essential. Tenderly is participating with numerous other companies in the KERNEL Security Track, stewarded by Gitcoin. Cohorts can use all features of Tenderly Pro for free during the duration of the program.

The Security Track

Even though it sounds like a new service provided by the TSA, the KERNEL Security Track, in our opinion, is one of the most important initiatives happening in the space right now.

I couldn’t shill you the Security Track better than Gitcoin’s team:

Security researchers, some of the most important builders of our web3 ecosystem, are still a scarce resource. Our aim with KERNEL 2 x Security is to help those passionate about security with a desire to become security experts and auditors. This is about laying the foundations, taking the first steps, but also learning best practices that will help them test in production in a more secure and principled way.

Gitcoin isn’t the only team that saw the need for a program like this one: both Yearn and Status recognized the need for a fresh influx of security professionals. By security professionals, I’m talking about both researchers and auditors alike.

How Tenderly helps with security?

From the very beginning, our focus has been providing true visibility into things happening on-chain. We took a drastically different approach than others: we implemented our version of the EVM, which extracts dozens of times more data than the standard JSON-RPC.

The Tenderly Gas-Profiler

Firstly we delivered human-readable stack-traces to decrease the time needed to reason about transactions. We followed with the Visual Debugger and the Gas Profiler, which took introspection to a whole new level. Soon after, our best-in-class monitoring and alerting solutions started helping protocol and DApp developers to sleep better at night.

And then we come to the community favorite: the Simulator. You can use the Simulator to see what a transaction would do if submitted on-chain, without actually sending it! Or better yet, you can change parameters of historical transactions, even the smart contract code, and check what would’ve happened!

You can change the parameter of a historical transaction

Web3 Notebooks

Finally, we come to my favorite part of any article: the teaser! Imagine if there was a way to write a document with all of the Tenderly tooling built-in! Think of it like Jupyter notebooks or Observable, only catered towards the Web3 ecosystem.

This solution enables numerous use-cases that previously weren’t possible: interactive audits, hack analysis where you can see what happened, amazing tutorials, interactive documentation, and so much more.

We’re testing this new product internally but are looking for testers once closed beta testing starts. If you’re an auditor, analyst, hacker, buidler, or just love toying around with DeFi and different protocols, we would love to hear your thoughts!

You can apply by DMing us on Twitter, joining our Discord, contacting us via your Tenderly Dashboard, or sending us an e-mail over at support@tenderly.co.

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