Space Summary
The Twitter Space KuCoin x Forta hosted by kucoincom. The KuCoin x Forta Twitter space delved into strategies for identifying crypto gems, protecting against scams, engaging in the community, and exploring trading opportunities. Participants discussed the significance of due diligence, community interaction, and staying informed on market trends. Key takeaways included tips on portfolio diversification, leveraging KuCoin's features, and participating in Telegram discussions for valuable insights. By emphasizing research and community engagement, the space provided valuable insights for both beginners and experienced traders in the dynamic world of cryptocurrency trading.
For more spaces, visit the Trading page.
Questions
Q: How can one differentiate between a potential crypto gem and a scam project on KuCoin?
A: Research, community insights, and checking project fundamentals are key.
Q: Why is community engagement essential for crypto enthusiasts on KuCoin?
A: Engagement fosters learning, awareness, and trust within the community.
Q: What security measures should individuals take to protect themselves from crypto scams?
A: Using secure exchanges, verifying information, and staying informed on scam tactics.
Q: What advantages does KuCoin offer for traders compared to other platforms?
A: KuCoin provides a wide range of cryptocurrencies, low fees, and strong security measures.
Q: How can beginners start their crypto journey effectively on KuCoin?
A: Researching projects, starting with small investments, and leveraging educational resources.
Q: What role does due diligence play in successful crypto investments on KuCoin?
A: Thorough research and analysis minimize investment risks and enhance opportunities.
Q: Is diversification important in building a crypto portfolio on KuCoin?
A: Diversification spreads risks and allows exposure to various crypto assets.
Q: Why is it crucial to stay updated on the latest crypto trends while trading on KuCoin?
A: Being informed helps in making educated investment decisions and seizing opportunities.
Q: How can the KuCoin Telegram community enhance one's crypto journey?
A: The community provides support, insights, and a platform for discussions on crypto-related topics.
Q: What are the benefits of discovering new projects on KuCoin?
A: Access to emerging cryptocurrencies, potential growth opportunities, and early investments.
Q: How does KuCoin contribute to the overall crypto ecosystem and market dynamics?
A: The platform offers liquidity, diversity, and innovation within the crypto space.
Highlights
Time: 00:17:52
Identifying Promising Crypto Gems on KuCoin Strategies and tools for uncovering potential investment opportunities.
Time: 00:26:15
Safeguarding Against Crypto Scams Tips for protecting yourself from fraudulent schemes.
Time: 00:37:40
Engaging in the KuCoin Telegram Community Joining discussions, sharing insights, and learning from the community.
Time: 00:45:59
Navigating the Crypto Landscape Guidance for both beginners and experienced traders on navigating the crypto market.
Time: 00:55:21
Opportunities and Trends in the Crypto Market Insights on current trends and potential opportunities in the crypto space.
Time: 01:05:42
Benefits of Trading on KuCoin Exploring the advantages and features of using KuCoin for cryptocurrency trading.
Time: 01:16:05
Due Diligence in Crypto Investments Importance of research and analysis in making informed investment decisions.
Time: 01:27:19
Building a Strong Crypto Portfolio Tips for diversifying investments and creating a resilient crypto portfolio.
Time: 01:35:44
Community Interaction on KuCoin Engaging with the community for learning, support, and knowledge sharing.
Time: 01:45:02
Discovering New Projects on KuCoin Exploring emerging cryptocurrencies and investment opportunities on the platform.
Key Takeaways
- Strategies for identifying promising cryptocurrencies on KuCoin are shared.
- Importance of safeguarding against crypto scams and maintaining online security is emphasized.
- Engagement in Telegram communities for crypto discussions and knowledge sharing.
- Tips on navigating the crypto landscape for beginners and experienced traders.
- Insights on the latest trends and opportunities in the crypto market.
- Benefits of using KuCoin for trading and discovering new projects.
- Understanding the significance of due diligence in crypto investments.
- Exploring potential crypto gems on KuCoin through research and analysis.
- Building a strong crypto portfolio by diversifying investments on reliable platforms.
- Opportunities for community interaction and learning within the KuCoin ecosystem.
Behind the Mic
Testing the Audio Setup
All right, I just want to test out my mic. Can you guys hear me well? Sounds good. Perfect. I know we're just waiting for the Forta account to join as well, but we had some connection issues so perhaps you can just try again and request to speak and I'll get you up here as a silent speaker. In the meantime, Andy, can you just introduce yourself? We'll be going over fort a firewall. This is not their first coupon fireside chat with you guys, but wanted to just get you back on to have to know to hear about all the updates that you guys have made. In the meantime, perhaps you can start with a high level introduction to yourself. What is your goal? And perhaps a little bit more about your background.
Introduction of Andy
Yeah, sure. Hi everyone, my name is Andy. I lead the ecosystem team at Forta. Really excited to talk with everyone about Fort a firewall, which is a new security network we announced last Thursday. Goal for today for me is to introduce this new network to all of you. Talk about what the benefits are to the DeFi ecosystem especially we think this is going to have a big impact on the frequency and severity of exploits. And so excited to dive into details. We haven't fully launched this network yet. We've just announced that it's coming in Q four. So I'll talk about a few things at a high level because we haven't released all the details about everything, but those will be coming out over the subsequent weeks. We are shooting for an October launch, so keep an eye on that.
Explaining Forta Firewall
Awesome. And I guess the next question would be just to introduce for the firewall what problems it aims to solve alongside, perhaps just give us a little bit more detail into how Florida is different from any other competitors or similar projects in the space. Yeah, definitely. Thanks, Tim. So firewall is the next phase of the Florida network and the purpose is to identify and block exploit transactions before they cause harm. So at a high level, what firewall's doing is it is screening transactions. Before that, a transaction is included and executed in a block. So we call these pre chain transactions because they're not processed yet, we're screening them at that pre chain level to determine if they're safe or malicious. And safe transactions will be processed. Normally, malicious transactions will be blocked during execution. Let me dive into different aspects of that process.
Forta's Technology for Threat Detection
Screening transactions for the last couple of years, Forda has been focused on threat detection. So we've developed a lot of technology, a lot of it relies on AI and machine learning to, in a very scalable way, look at on chain activity and all the data that we have available and try and determine in real time what malicious activity is on chain. And so we've been identifying both exploits, smart contract exploits, as well as like end user scam activity, and we got really good at that over the last couple of years. The challenge with doing, focusing just on detection is that, you know, were able to emit a lot of alerts about bad things that we saw on chain, but weren't able to prevent those things from happening. What we're doing with firewall is we're taking all that really cool, innovative detection technology and applying it the same way were applying it before, but we're doing it earlier in the transaction lifecycle, and we're inserting it into the transaction flow itself so that we're actually able to not just alert someone that something bad is about to happen, but we can actually block that activity from going through entirely.
Integration and Benefits of Firewall Implementation
We were able to plug in this firewall screening directly into a DeFi protocol at the smart contract level. We can also plug in directly to roll ups at the RPC or sequencer level. The idea is the same. We want to flag things that we think are bad as early as possible and then prevent them from executing. So the benefit of doing this is that obviously it's a, you know, we want to stop the exploit from happening, prevent the damage. We believe that doing it at sort of this stage in the transaction lifecycle is the most sort of reliable way to prevent an attack. Some of the other alternatives that listeners may be aware of are things like front running an attack. You can front run and try and pause your protocol quickly. You can front run and try and rescue the funds that are at risk quickly.
Challenges of Front Running
The challenge with front running as an approach is that just you have to be faster than the attacker, and that's not always possible. And so maybe it works 10% of the time, 20% of the time, 30% of the time. Firewall can work 99% of the time. And so we think screening and blocking transactions at the pre chain level is just a much more effective and reliable way of prevention as compared to some of the other alternatives that are available.
Nascent Security Market
Tim, you asked about what the competitive landscape for this area looks like pre chain security is, or on chain security, as we're referring to it now, is a very nascent corner of the security market. There's not a lot of, there aren't a lot of solutions out there in the market. It's very early. We think we're going to set a new trend here. I think over the next year or two, you're going to see a lot more of this happening, both at the DeFi protocol level and with roll ups doing screening for both security and compliance reasons.
Leading The Charge
So we think we're leading the charge here and really excited to see how the market reacts to it in October when it's actually live. Perfect. I like you, just dive a little deeper into prevention. So you mentioned basically, you just, you're able to, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're able to detect the sort of malicious activity a lot earlier, ahead of time.
Importance of Early Detection
Can you just walk us through why that's important, other than the obvious reasons and a little bit more about how it works? Yep, sure. So the goal is to, and I guess, you know, some of this is coming from, you know, how traditionally technology companies, financial institutions, et cetera, have prevented malicious activity. You've got tens of thousands, millions of transactions happening every day on these networks.
Challenges Without Prevention
And prior to firewall, there was no way to stop a malicious transaction from going through. Right? Assuming that transaction was technically valid, meaning it was executing a function call that exists and there was a proper gas fees paid, that transaction would go through. Even if the protocol didn't want that transaction to go through, it would still happen because there was no way to stop it.
Managing Risks
And different people can disagree on whether we should or shouldn't insert ourselves into the approval process of a transaction. But we believe that, or we're of the opinion that every defi project, every chain, has the ability to manage its own risk and should be able to choose for itself which transactions it wants to accept and which ones it wants to not accept.
Screening Transactions
So if you agree with that premise, then being able to screen transactions for both security risks and compliance risks makes sense. As long as there's technology to do it, let's do it. So how do we screen? So we're looking at all of the information that we have available on a transaction before it's executed, and we're looking at the sort of execution path of that transaction.
Determining Risk Scores
Meaning what functions in a smart contract? Is it calling? What addresses are involved in that transaction? What amounts, what dollar amounts are involved in that transaction? Anything that we can look at on chain we are using, we're feeding all of those inputs into a ML model, and that ML model is making a determination about whether that transaction is high risk or low risk.
Risk Scoring Mechanism
Now, what we do to go a little deeper here, every transaction that gets screened receives a risk score between zero and one. The closer the risk score is to one the higher the likelihood that it's malicious and an exploit. So, for example, if the firewall scores a transaction at, you know, 0.1, it's likely that's a safe transaction, normal user behavior.
Threshold Settings for Teams
If firewall scores a transaction at 0.9, that is much higher risk transaction. It looks more anomalous and likely an exploit. And teams that are using firewall can set the threshold above which they will block transactions. So, for example, team can say, we're going to block every transaction that receives a risk score above 0.8, and so they'll filter based on that.
Training Models with Historical Data
So the way, a little bit more on the ML side, how it works is, and this is how we've done detection for years and how other teams do detection as well. Today you are training a model with a bunch of historical transaction data. The cool thing about web three and blockchains is that all the transaction data is public.
Leveraging Historical Data
We can use all of that to train models over and over and over again. We have roughly, at least in the EVM ecosystem, we've got six, seven years of exploit transaction data going back to 2017 ish, 2018. Probably that's when the first DeFi application sort of started to get tested. Right? And some of those involve malicious smart contracts that were deployed.
Training Models on Malicious Smart Contracts
So we've got five or six years of malicious smart contracts we can look at, and so we can train models based on that data, and then we can tune it over time so we can keep running all of that transaction activity through the model and we can tell it, okay, you identified this one correctly. This one was a false positive. We need to take that into account. Next time we see a transaction like that, it should actually be a lower risk score. And you keep doing that over and over again until you've tuned the models such that transactions that are receiving a risk score above 0.8 or 0.9 are all legitimate exploit transactions. And everything else is a safe transaction that looks like normal user behavior. That's the process that we run through at a granular level, and then we just apply it at scale to a particular DeFi protocols transactions, or to a particular roll ups transactions.
Product Launch and Collaboration Opportunities
Awesome. And can you share some of the numbers or some of the achievements that you guys have made so far just to contextualize where you guys are at with this particular product? Is it already live or how can protocols start using it, for example? Sure. Yeah. So I think, as I mentioned earlier in the intro, firewall is launching publicly in October. So Q four, early Q four, we are integrating with a few teams right now in anticipation of that October launch. So if there are a DeFi protocol teams or rollups listening, we would love to talk with you. And, you know, at a minimum, sort of test this out, you know, and explore sort of what it would look like to get this integrated into your system in terms of sort of measurable statistics.
Performance Metrics and Effectiveness
What I can say is, on the performance side, we are able to detect essentially 99% of exploits at a very low false positive ratio. So what we like to say is, in every 100,000 transactions that we screen, the goal is to only flag one false positive. So that would be a 0.001% fp rate. One in 100,000 transactions is sort of what we're shooting for. You're never going to be perfect when you're screening and blocking transactions, especially when you're using machine learning. But we want to be as close to perfect as possible. We're pretty confident that this will be the most effective solution out there, at least as it relates to stopping exploit transactions. So those are some numbers on the performance side.
Historical Detection of Exploits
And then historically, when it comes to just detecting exploits, Florida regularly detects exploits in advance. And we tweet about a lot of that stuff. I think over the last two or three years, we've detected. Over the last two years, we've detected 40 plus exploits in advance, largely based on identifying a malicious smart contract that was deployed on chain that an attacker is using to carry out an exploit. So we can zero in on those contracts and sort of label them as bad pretty early, pretty quick. So that was one of the techniques that we used early on. And so you'll see our twitter account. Whenever there's an exploit, we're usually tweeting something along those lines that it was detected in advance.
Future Vision and Goals
So we do a lot of that. And firewall is just kind of applying all that same detection technology, just applying it earlier and embedding it into the transaction flow so that we can actually stop things from happening, not just detect them. So let me pause there, see if you have any follow ups. Yeah, I guess my final question is just more about what else you can share about upcoming, I guess, either new products or anything else in the roadmap that you can share with the Kucoin community here, as well as what the overall vision is for your project. Let's say a few years down the line as well.
Overview of Future Enhancements
Yeah, absolutely. So I guess I'll take the vision question and maybe weave in the roadmap there. So Florida's vision is to generally protect the web three ecosystem, protect smart contracts, specifically, the way that we want to do that, the best way we think we can do that going forward is to, we want to be able to screen every transaction happening on a public blockchain. That's every defi transaction in particular, because that's where most of the risk today is. So most of the TVL risk exists. So we want to be able to screen every transaction happening through a DeFi protocol.
Transaction Activity and Screening Expansion
A lot of that transaction activity is moving to l two s, l three s app chains. And so that's where a lot of that screening is likely to happen in the future. So we obviously want to be able to support all the transaction activity at that level, and we want to be able to prevent those exploits from happening. So in two or three years, we will have done our job.
Vision and Roadmap
If the number of exploits and the severity of those exploits is significantly reduced from what you see today, and I think we will be successful in that. So that's our long term vision in terms of roadmap. Like I said, we're going to launch in October. So firewall will be publicly available. There'll be a lot more details and documentation available for everyone to around October. The network is likely to decentralize further after October. So initially, Florida will be the only one screening transactions. Over time, we will have more teams screening those transactions. So you can imagine other security companies, like a smart contract auditor, for example, doing screening maybe for their audit clients. There's other security teams out there that are focused on detection today. They can participate in the network as well.
Ecosystem Development
So there's an ecosystem sort of angle to this as well, which as the ecosystem lead at Forta, I will be trying to build out over the next six months. So my hope is that in that one to two year timeframe, we've got a pretty robust ecosystem of security providers that are screening and blocking transactions in real time, not just Forta, and that we think that's the best way to scale this, because different DeFi protocols, different roll ups, trust different security providers out there. So we want to give everybody options. And like I said, we think 100% of transactions should be screened for malicious activity and prevented if they are deemed to be malicious.
Scaling and Future Outlook
And the easiest way to get there is by leveraging the crowd and having them help screen, because transaction activity is likely to increase the more users get onboarded into Defi and web three. So as that transaction activity scales, our networks going to need to scale as well. That's what we're excited about. Awesome. Thanks for your time, Andy. As always, this is nothing. financial advice and just informational. is there anything else you'd like to share with us before we end the spaces? I think now would be the time.
Promoting Firewall
I might, I guess to the extent that anyone listening is, you know, inclined to read a little bit more about firewall. We did post kind of a teaser blog last Thursday. It's fortunate.org blog. You'll see the firewall post at the top. In that blog post, there's a link to a form if you are interested in speaking with us about firewall. If you'd like a demo, we're happy to set that up for you. You can just reach out to that form in the blog post. I think it asks for your name, email, telegram, things like that. Basic contact information.
User Engagement and Next Steps
Someone from our team will be in touch with you real shortly and we'll set. We'll set some time up to chat. So I would. I would just direct anybody listening who wants to learn more to that blog post and to reach out to us in that form, we would love to chat with you. Awesome. Thank you so much again for tuning in, everyone. And I'd like to thank Andy again for coming on and sharing everything about Ford. A firewall. Definitely recommend go checking it out, follow their Twitter, et cetera.
Closing Remarks
And then we have one final Kucoin fireside chat in about half an hour with orderly networks. I hope you guys can tune in as well. So thanks again, Andy, and hope to see you very soon. Thanks, Tim. Thanks all.
