This article comes fromBloomberg, original author: Hannah Miller

This article comes from

Bloomberg

, original author: Hannah Miller

Odaily Translator | Nian Yin Si Tang

Halborn, a Miami-based blockchain security company, announced the completion of a $90 million Series A funding round. The deal stands out amid a slowdown in venture capital investment in crypto startups and a plunge in digital currency prices.

The round was led by Summit Partners, with participation from Castle Island Ventures, Digital Currency Group (DCG), and Brevan Howard. The three-year-old startup declined to disclose its valuation.

As the prices of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum plummeted, many cryptocurrency-related companies have recently sought to raise funds at lower valuations and have laid off workers. But Halborn CEO Rob Behnke said the startup's focus on cybersecurity has allowed it to weather the "encryption winter.""The price of cryptocurrencies has nothing to do with our business," he said in an interview. "What really matters is that the whole industry is growing."The point is, plenty of criminals have been trying to steal cryptocurrencies. As high-profile hacks rocked the industry, Halborn has noticed an increase in demand for the company's services over the past year, Halborn said. The 100-plus-employee startup aims to fix possible vulnerabilities in the code underpinning blockchain platforms and develop security measures to fix them, such as the $620 million hack involving NFT game Axie Infinity in March event.

At the end of March this year, the Axie Infinity sidechain Ronin verifier node was hacked,

173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC were stolen, if ETH is calculated at the price of 3400 USDT at that time, the loss is about 616 million US dollars. The theft was due to the theft of the private keys of Sky Mavis's four Ronin validators and a third-party validator run by Axie DAO (five of the nine validator signatures are required for withdrawals). According to the official statement, the attack occurred on March 23, but on the 29th, users reported that they could not withdraw 5,000 ETH from the cross-chain bridge before discovering the attack.

Additionally, the startup discovered a vulnerability in the popular crypto wallet MetaMask that was announced last month. "We've been stuck on this for almost a year until they fixed it," Halborn co-founder and chief information security officer Steve Walbroehl said in an interview.

June 16 news

, At least 10 browser plug-in wallets including MetaMask and Phantom may have the possibility of exposing login information due to a problem in the Javascript language. use. MetaMask and Phantom said they have fixed the vulnerability. Both parties said there was no evidence the vulnerability was ever exploited by attackers, meaning no user funds are known to have been affected.

At the time, Halborn was awarded a $50,000 bounty for disclosing the vulnerability and advised users to switch to new wallet addresses. Steve Walbroehl said that the vulnerability has existed for a long time, and it is best to change the wallet address out of caution.

At the same time, the company is also working with Coinbase Global Inc., the Solana blockchain, and Ava Labs, developer of the Avalanche blockchain. It even provides training for non-crypto companies like Amazon.com Inc., BNY Mellon and Nike Inc. on how to use and keep them safe. Additionally, Halborn advises VCs, family offices and banks on the risk levels of crypto projects.