2:35Jasmine BrunsonSo I pivoted from those opportunities and decided to full-fledged and get into Web3 security. I did do a project with some people in DeFi insurance. So I, I did, I thought that that model was a little bit too early for its inception, being that there’s still research papers coming out about DeFi risk and how to actually create insurance policies and premiums behind existential risks that can cost multimillion dollars. Like Rowan Network alone lost about $624 million, almost a billion dollars due to a single bridge attack. So I knew that this space is gonna continue to grow. And so I went into my toolbook or toolbox as a developer and said, you know what, I’m gonna pick up this new skill, which is smart contracts research.
2:35Jasmine BrunsonI’ve joined some pretty amazing communities. I would like to also plug in Patrick Collins, who is one of the developers from Chainlink who siphoned and went off and did his own thing with smart contract auditing and teaching people about that. So I’ve used his YouTube videos as a resource. And then also plug in for Johnny Time, has a class on smart contract hacking. So these are some resources that you all can kind of take into consideration and take courses and look at these free YouTube videos to develop this skill.
4:41AAwesome.
4:44Kamal HubbardThat is awesome. And you’re right, there is absolutely an opportunity here. And that’s why I think it’s great to have you on and kind of discuss this a little bit more. But for someone who is considering a career in Web3, don’t know where to start, I think, and may not even know the proper nomenclature, right? How would you define and describe what smart contracts are for someone like that?
5:15Jasmine BrunsonYeah, it’s always hard to kind of explain things as a techie, but I’ll try my best. So smart contracts at a high level is cryptographic code that enforces instructions. And to even reduce that even more, think of a smart contract similar to a standard contract that we have with like our lawyers and people that we do business with, right? Instead of me hiring a lawyer to go ahead and say that, okay, I owe Kamal $500 for the service that he gave me, let’s get a contract, let’s contact a lawyer and let’s get an agreement. Instead of doing that, we remove the lawyer, which is the intermediary, and we create a smart contract, which is code that enforces that I owe Kamal $500.
5:15Jasmine Brunsonby this time period. And if I don’t pay him, all those consequences are embedded in that contract for as a penalty against me not paying that on time. So at a high level, I think that’s where the world is headed with development of smart contracts. And when people think of smart contracts, they’re like, what the heck is that? What does it look like? I feel as though people who don’t come from a tech-savvy background might think like, what does a smart contract look like? It’s just code. It’s literally all that funny code that you see on Google. Like all that homebrew green and black code.
5:15Jasmine BrunsonLike that’s literally what it is. And I feel as though that the best way to start if you’re not really tech savvy is to look at what Solidity is, ’cause that’s where most of the code is written. That’s how most of the code is written when it comes to the cryptocurrency space. As a lot of the fluctuation in the amount of projects that are being developed are through the Ethereum network, right? Because Bitcoin has scripting which there’s not much of development coming out of Bitcoin, even though we have NFT Ordinals and all these other projects by way of Taproot. However, most of the new projects that are coming out in the DeFi and NFT space are through EVM, it’s through Ethereum.
5:15Jasmine BrunsonSo check out Solidity if you’re still trying to understand what a smart contract is and what it looks like.
7:23Kamal HubbardYou know, you discussed your background in decentralized insurance, and I definitely agree with you. The overall use case for the broader insurance industry for decentralized insurance is very much, it’s early. But can you define and describe generally what decentralized insurance is and how it’s different from conventional insurance to those listening?
7:51Jasmine BrunsonYeah, so at a high level, DeFi in itself, DeFi in itself is putting traditional financial services on a blockchain. So that’s everything from synthetics, derivatives to payments to options, and then also things like insurance. So think of us putting the typical insurance policies that we have on our mortgage, life, etc., on the blockchain. But specifically for DeFi insurance, it’s insurance on your assets, your crypto tokens and assets. So say if a project gets hacked or unfortunately it falters to a smart contract bug, all right, the hacker siphons it, that insurance policy is supposed to issue a premium just in case that you unfortunately get rug pulled, or unfortunately you falter to a smart contract vulnerability, because not only does a vulnerability hinder the protocol, but it also hinders you as a user.
7:51Jasmine BrunsonSo there’s a few types of insurance, parametric insurance, etc. However, at the time in which I was pioneering on a project like that, I did not think that there was enough liquidity in the market, nor was there enough attention on how DeFi insurance could scale at large. So I actually pivoted from that opportunity like immediately. And I decided, I was like, why not fix the actual problem in the crypto space and the DeFi space, which is the bugs and vulnerabilities? How do we do that? And it does take some technical background and knowledge. However, I’ve seen people on bug bounty programs with zero to no experience in coding and understand the threat models and understand where bugs, what bugs look like on the smart contracts and find low-level bugs.
7:51Jasmine BrunsonSo at a high level, I don’t think insurance, DeFi insurance at this point can really scale just yet because even when we had DeFi summer in 2020, we were seeing all these hacks left and right. But these insurance protocols have to have liquidity available to cover a Ronin Network type of attack or a Binance Bridge type of attack, $1 billion, half a billion dollar attacks. So we’re going to see projects like that come out in the future. However, I do think that projects like GotLent and Insurance, and they’re, they’re coming out with some interesting ideas and use cases and even leveraging AI to do it.
7:51Jasmine BrunsonAnd even with CeFi insurance, we saw that CeFi insurance didn’t really even work with Nexus Mutual and all these other companies that pay out premiums. But however, it’s, it’s not substantial enough to actually ensure a major multi-level exploit. Now that bridges exist, it’s not only an innovation -- innovative solution that’s relatively new, but the surface area for tokens is like a honeypot for these hackers. How can we ensure against the bridge at this moment in, in DeFi? That’s kind of like my philosophical question. So that, that’s, those are my views on that. But I, I really think that at the end of the day, when we think of traditional finance put on a blockchain, there are some limitations.
7:51Jasmine BrunsonNot everything that came from traditional finance needs to be put on the blockchain. A lot of that stuff is broken.
11:08Kamal HubbardYeah, I, I agree with a number of things you just said there, one, one of which is, you know, any bridging that you’re doing is really putting your funds at, uh, major risk just due to, uh, all the past exploits that have taken place and You know, that just seems like that since it’s so new and things are changing and it is getting more secure. But it’s always seemed like a big risk to just move money from one chain to another using these bridges. And hackers are always just waiting to steal millions of dollars through that vector. So, but I think this moves us well into the next question. And what is Rektify AI? You really spoke to what led you to be a founder in the company and what led you to this direction. But can you tell us more about the services that you provide at Rektify AI?
12:20Jasmine BrunsonAbsolutely, absolutely. So at a high level, I’m going to give like a little story. Uh, it’s -- I’m gonna, I’m gonna plug that in for your, um, podcast because, you know, I have a lot of respect for you, and I think that I don’t really talk about the story that often. So when I started this company, um, I had just pivoted from working at Maxar, and I knew that I wanted to do Web3 and cryptocurrency full-time. It’s something that I was a little bit more passionate about, and it’s something where I wanted to leverage my skills in data science and computer science in real time and, and build cool stuff.
12:20Jasmine BrunsonSo when I pivoted from that company, um, last February, February 2022, uh, I told myself, I said, okay, now I’m starting from scratch, you know what I mean? I, I’m not going to be in a job pool. I’m gonna just focus on building my own stuff and seeing what works and seeing what’s needed for industry. So I went to ETH Denver that February, and when I was at ETH Denver, I was around all these builders. I was talking about my ideas. I was, I was coding and things of that sort. And I sat down and I was like, I think Web3 security, I think that smart contract bugs, I think that learning about how to prevent phishing attacks to people who use Discord is like where it’s at.
12:20Jasmine BrunsonLike, I think this is the future. So at the time I had named the company Sina Labs. Now, as I went on, I started doing pitches. I started, you know, I saw that Brent Faiyaz had a Show You Off grant competition exclusively for Black women founders who unfortunately don’t get enough capital. capital allocated. Um, only 0.3% of venture capital is allocated to Black women founders, and that’s like literally like the bottom, um, of the totem pole when it comes to distribution. So, you know, I’m thankful for him and his, his program, but I applied to that, I got it, and when I got that grant, it actually came on my birthday.
12:20Jasmine BrunsonSo that was like really like a sign of God to like continue building and iterating on this idea. Later on, I did the, um, the Black Bitcoin Billionaires competition in Miami, uh, That’s by Nadja Roberts, Lamar Wilson, and Isaiah Jackson. Super shout out to them. I’m thankful for them for all that they’ve done for our community. And like when I did that pitch, I still was trying to figure out where I was going. I talked about adversary attacks in Web3 and crypto. I spoke about all the attacks that have been happening and I wanted to build a solution. And that grant came through and that pitch competition, we won that one.
12:20Jasmine BrunsonSo I was just like, okay, Continue building momentum, continue iterating on the idea. Later in that year, I had, um, got a dream, and in a dream I kept hearing the word Rectify, Rectify, Rectify, but it was spelled like -- I could see the words and the words were spelled R-E-K-T, like Wrecking Crypto. And I was like, okay, this is the name of the company. I ran it by one of my friends who’s a really, uh, well-known artist in the Web3 space, and he said this is genius. Like, and I take the opinions of my artist friends really, really well because they see life in a different lens.
12:20Jasmine BrunsonSo change the name from Cena Labs to Rektify AI. Then we started doing the hackathons. We started doing hackathons through, um, Developer Cloud Week. I did, um, a hackathon through ETH Global called Hack Money. We became a semifinalist for that. You know, I started putting my money where my mouth was when it came to actually building something and seeing if the industry needed it. And throughout these hackathons, And even these pitch competitions, it kept proving that the industry needed a solution for smart contract auditing. And at a high level, after a while I said, look, okay, we won Tron Grand Hackathon, we’re running these hackathons, let’s sit down and let’s start helping people, let’s start getting customers, et cetera.
12:20Jasmine BrunsonSo what Rektify AI does at a high level is we do smart contract auditing, which means that we go through the code of your crypto project, whether it be an NFT project, a DeFi project, altcoin, et cetera. We go through that smart contract, step, we find bugs manually. We have an 80% manual ratio and a 20% automated ratio. So manually, we have some experts that will go in, go line by line, and look for bugs in your code, whether it be reentrancy, whether it be integer overflow, underflow, prevention from front-running, sandwich attacks, et cetera. And then the 20% comes from the automated testing. So we use some automated test tools that are code analysis tools like Slither, Metheril, Methax, But the reason why we have that AI at the end of the name is that we’re building our own in-house code analysis tool, and it’s leveraging a certain artificial neural networks called graph neural networks to detect smart contract bugs.
12:20Jasmine BrunsonSo at a high level, one of the main things that I went to college for was research. For the past year and a half, I have been researching all types of artificial neural networks that can help us as the human auditors, as the experts, find the multi-level, or I would say low-level to informational bugs such as grass optimizations and even smaller reentrancy bugs so that we as a human can focus on the high severity and medium severity bugs. So that is, that is at a high level what Rektify AI is doing and what we’re contributing to. And then we’re also rolling out some products for end users in this space that unfortunately are neglected right now.
12:20Jasmine BrunsonThe main tool for end users to prevent risk is maybe like a phishing plugin that they’ll use right before they connect their MetaMask to like a fake site that’s going to mint a fake NFT and wallet drain them, etc. But I wanted to help users with the idea of doing their own research because after doing a lot of customer discovery, I learned that there’s a lot of people who want to enter crypto but they don’t know how to do their own research. They don’t know where to start. They don’t know how to vet the founders or how to vet the project development team. So we’re actually iterating on our idea right now, which is a risk management app that will help people do their own research in crypto, and it’ll display the names of the founders of a project a risk score associated with it, uh, the number of audits that project has had, etc., etc.
12:20Jasmine BrunsonAnd we have some API partners such as Chain Abuse and a few others that we’ve been working with as well to get this out on the market. So that’s what we do at a high level. And, um, it’s spelled Rektify AI, so rectify.ai.
18:42Kamal HubbardIn your, uh, the work that you’re doing to make smart contracts more secure? How do you prioritize security, obviously, um, between the efficiency of smart contract functionality?
19:03Jasmine BrunsonYeah, that’s a great question. I think security is always going to be a front runner for whatever reason. Um, I, I’ll give you an example. Um, we had a project where they’re doing a DEX on Base and There was issues with original contract that they had where the bytecode was super large. However, they needed the functionality of that code for it to even function. So we were trying to figure out ways where they can like truncate it and make it and sparse it so that it’s not as much overhead, right? I think the very the most important piece to shipping off a protocol is the security aspect.
19:03Jasmine BrunsonAnd if you’re trying to cut corners by saying, okay, this code we need this, I see. I know. noticed that there’s a reentrancy in this, or I’ve noticed that there’s some type of price manipulation bug in this, but we need to ship it because XYZ. That is not a protocol that we’re willing to like work with, because not only does that fall on you as a project manager or a team developer or a developer on that team, or even a protocol, your users are going to unfortunately falter to the risk of your code. So I think at a high level, what I code projects time and time again, depending on the scope of your project, it’s really smart for you to get 2 to 3 audits depending on your budget and depending on, um, your, you know, your bandwidth.
19:03Jasmine BrunsonNow that’s another reason why we partner with auditors as well. We want to make sure that if we have companies that’s coming to us and saying, hey, Rektify AI, we need an audit, but we have a, a budget, but they have a large code base, we work with other auditors so that we can kind of work with them in terms of the budget piece because they want to ship good code and they want to ship workable code that is little -- has little to no bugs that will render it useless. And I actually appreciate projects that will actually come and be upfront with us because there will be projects that will launch, have zero audits, or do internal auditing, which they think that is enough.
19:03Jasmine BrunsonAnd to be quite honest, the developer assumptions in this space is actually very prevalent. Being from a person who’s worked with developers in this space, having conversations, having meetings, there’s a lot of assumptions that goes into how code functionalities work, how this ternary operator was created, and things of that sort. You really gotta sit down with these devs and have high-level conversations. And what I’ve learned is you really have to do that to even understand the code base. You have to understand the people who actually built it out because A lot of personality goes into code development, to be quite honest. Um, so that’s kind of how I look at it.
19:03Jasmine BrunsonBut I, I always try to steer people in the right direction when it comes to what they’re able to commit to, um, their, their development, right? Because this is their baby. Like, this is probably the first DeFi protocol they’re launching. This is probably their first NFT project that has a social impact statement. You know, it might be helping raise money for, for charities and things of that sort. So I do take that into consideration as well.
22:17Kamal HubbardI want to ask you a little bit about your journey in Web3 and blockchain as a Black woman. I mean, you’ve done a lot in the space, so can you tell me what your experience has been like?
22:34Jasmine BrunsonYeah, I mean, I’ll say this. I think that participating in this space has been super dope. dope. It’s been super awesome. I’ve met some great people, I’ve met some not so great people. And the way I’d look at it is, um, oftentimes if you dwell on things where it’s like negative, like bad interactions, etc., you forget all the good interactions that you had. So I’ve been kind of thinking in that framework, like just bringing in the people that, um, that actually want to build a safer Web3, that want to build -- to actually build Web3, you know, in general. There’s been so many talks, especially in the Black Web3 community, about is Web3 going to include us, right?
22:34Jasmine BrunsonWe see the issues with like NFT artists not even getting paid what they should be getting paid, even though the space, the value proposition is that NFTs will now give the artist the proper equity that they deserve for their artwork, right? So I look at it as like, if we continue to participate in this space, we continue to take up space and to be unapologetically about it, no one can stop us and no one can touch us. And I’ve been blessed to have an amazing community, the Black Blockchain Summit has been with me from day one. I went to that conference for the first time in 2019, and when I tell you the magic that was felt when I, I like even doing the libations -- I was still a college kid at the time -- but even like helping with the libations to listening to all the talks to meeting some of my best friends to this day at that conference, I knew that in a sense that God was creating a safe space for me that I can always go back to, especially if the rest of the Web3 industry, the rest of the crypto blockchain industry did not accept me.
22:34Jasmine BrunsonSo at a high level, I just think about -- I think about it like this. You have to build your tribe, and you have to build a tribe where it’s collective love and it’s collective understanding and respect, mutual respect, you know what I mean? Because at the end of the day, um, we’re all here, or at least the most people that I associate with are all here to build an economic engine that is going to be financially inclusive, that’s going going to mitigate systemic risk, and that’s going to open up opportunities for people who have been historically excluded out of wealth building. All right, because oftentimes I hear these, these cats talk about, yeah, we have this new DeFi bridge, man, we got $5 million invested by this company.
22:34Jasmine BrunsonYeah, we’re gonna build, we’re gonna make it financially inclusive, we’re gonna, we’re gonna bank the unbanked. But they don’t look like the unbanked. I can tell you right now that most of America, if you look at America, most of the people who are unbanked are in the rural South. And that just so happens to be where most African Black Americans or quote unquote African people are distributed in this America, right? So I look at, I look at like, if we want Web3 to be the ownership economy, we want it to be something that’s inclusive. We want this blockchain industry I’m gonna say that too, right?
22:34Jasmine BrunsonBecause I feel like Web3 kind of conflates everything. But this blockchain industry to be something that actually is reflective of what blockchain is, we’re gonna have to be able to distribute wealth. And then also, I would say, take away all those misnomers that we have in our minds, that those biases we’ve been systemically taught and ingrained in our head, and let those go for a minute. it and listen to what people are saying. Like, literally, like, listen to their journey, listen to their story, and listen to learn, not listen to respond. That’s kind of how I look at it. And like I said, I’m thankful for the people that I’ve met that have been super, super helpful and that I’ve been able to help because I don’t really look at it in a sense of like, oh, all these people are horrible, bad.
22:34Jasmine BrunsonThere are some systemic issues with the industry. But I do think that our presence is definitely necessary to make that change and to establish that we’re actually here building.
