Curve Finance’s current near-death expertise (and its averted propagation) might look like a blur in Web3’s rear-view mirror, however it’s truly one thing that retains taking place within the trade. It’s not the primary time {that a} decentralized finance protocol — or any decentralized app for that matter — has been affected by an assault that’s completely authorized inside its personal code. Extra so, the disaster might’ve been prevented if on-chain threat administration existed.
All of this factors to a broader downside in Web3. That’s the downside of restricted expressivity and assets that exist in its improvement environments and the way it impacts safety total.
Hack or exploit?
When the Curve Finance attacker was capable of retrieve US$61.7 million in property from Curve Finance’s good contracts, many media shops and commentators known as the occasion a “hack.” However this was not a hack — it was an exploit. The distinction right here is essential.
On this context, a hack would’ve taken place if the attacker had someway bypassed or damaged an current safety measure. However the assault on Curve was an exploit. Nothing that occurred that was out of the peculiar by way of what the protocol’s Vyper code allowed for. The looter merely took benefit of how the protocol’s design labored.
Who’s accountable for this? Nobody. Curve’s Vyper code, like a lot of the (Solidity) code that’s utilized in Web3 functions, is severely restricted in its means to specific complexity past comparatively easy transaction logic.
This makes it arduous for anybody to design safety measures that may forestall this or another assaults. Extra worryingly, it additionally makes it arduous for anybody to correctly design instruments to forestall their unfold throughout DeFi’s huge and composable liquidity panorama.
On-chain threat evaluation
Nevertheless it doesn’t imply there was nothing Curve might do to forestall this assault and its unfold throughout DeFi. A easy instance of an answer could be on-chain threat evaluation.
The generalized model of a problematic sample that might be solved might be summarized in a hypothetical scenario like this one:
- Dangerous actor Bob buys $5 million value of the extremely risky $RISKY token by way of a flashloan.
- The worth of $RISKY token is successfully pumped by Bob after the acquisition.
- Bob takes out a $100 million mortgage on Naive Finance backed by $RISKY.
- Naive Finance checks the worth of $RISKY and confirms that Bob is “good” for the cash.
- Bob runs.
- When Naive Finance liquidates $RISKY it’s only value $5 million.
(One other instance of this basic sample might be discovered within the Euler hack from March.)
Historically, this downside is solved by threat evaluation options that decide how good of a assure an asset might be. In the event that they existed on-chain, Naive Finance might test statistical estimations primarily based on the token’s historic value earlier than approving the mortgage. The protocol would’ve seen by the pump and denied Bob the $100 million.
DeFi is missing this sort of on-chain threat evaluation and administration.
Going again to Curve Finance, a variety might’ve been prevented if Aave and Frax had an automatic, on-chain restrict on mortgage approvals once they go a share of the collateral token’s circulating provide. This could’ve been a safer and fewer stress-inducing scenario for everyone.
Restricted expressivity and assets
The actual downside right here is that present Web3 ecosystems can’t help one thing like this on-chain threat evaluation resolution. They’re restricted by the sort of libraries and frameworks which might be accessible in digital machines just like the Ethereum Digital Machine. They’re additionally restricted by way of the assets at their disposal.
In an effort to develop one thing like this threat evaluation and administration resolution, a decentralized app would want to rely on coding libraries which have features for at the least fundamental mathematical ideas like logarithms and others.
This isn’t the case in Web3 as a result of dApps don’t have entry to NumPy, the mathematics module in Python, for instance. The everyday toolbox isn’t there and builders should reinvent the wheel as a substitute.
Then we’ve got one other downside. Even when that they had these libraries, they’d be too costly to code. Actually costly. The Ethereum Digital Machine is designed in order that there’s a value for each computation.
Whereas there are legitimate causes for this, equivalent to stopping infinite loops and such, it additionally creates a useful resource limitation for dApps that may must scale computationally with out incurring unreasonable prices. One might simply see how a threat administration resolution would value extra to run than what it’s capable of save in funds.
Specializing in the correct issues
At a localized stage, the unfold of the Curve Finance deadlock might’ve been prevented with on-chain threat administration. At a basic stage, this entire class of assaults might be prevented with extra expressivity and assets in Web3.
These are two elements of blockchain scalability which have lengthy been ignored as a result of they transcend affording extra shared block house for dApps. They really contain the creation of improvement environments in Web3 that emulate these of Web2. They’re about computational scalability and programmability, not simply scaling the quantity of knowledge that’s accessible on-chain.
Maybe if protocol builders at Curve, Aave or Frax had the flexibility to rely on a greater toolbox and extra assets, these and future exploits might be averted altogether. Perhaps we might begin with on-chain threat administration.
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