Is SaaS Crucial To Web3's Security And Sustainability?

Nearly $2.7 billion USD worth of crypto has been lost in 2022 to hacks of smart contracts or protocol infrastructure – a 63% increase from last year.

With flash loan attacks remaining detrimental to blockchain sustainability, Q2 2022 experienced over $870 million USD in losses.

The attacks plaguing Web3, however, are no different than the tried and tested tricks we have seen in Web2 infrastructures that are designed to exploit centralization and human error.

Indeed, innovations in crypto and blockchain have primarily focused on enhancing infrastructure, leaving the door open to those who work in SaaS to find solutions that address the gaps in smart contract layers.

What Are Users “Signing” With Their Crypto Wallets?

It is this “gap” that has undoubtedly allowed for poorly written smart contracts to feed into the loss of millions of dollars locked away and forever out of reach from creators and customers.

Alexei Dulub, the CEO of software development firm PixelPlex, recently presented Forbes Crypto with the question of whether any of us actually know what we are “signing” with a wallet like MetaMask?

And the answer for the majority of us, of course, is no, we don’t. When we visit a website, service, community, or game with the hopes of potentially joining, we are asked to connect a wallet like MetaMask in order to continue.

“It’s the digital equivalent of being able to shop in a boutique only after handing the store owner all of your banking details. It feels backward, unnecessary, and dangerous,” Forbes’ John Koetsier explained in his interview with Dulub.

Earlier this month, Dulub revealed his latest solution – Web3 Antivirus, a Google Chrome plugin that activates when a user is about to “sign” a transaction, and then temporarily pauses it while it analyzes the transaction for risk factors.

Specifically, the open-source plugin offers users an overview of the potential risks of signing that transaction, and lets the user make a more informed decision about whether to proceed or not.

Dulub also added that the plugin protects users from visiting phishing websites by checking domain names against thousands of blocklists, identifies suspicious logic with its proprietary ML models, and warns users if the website isn’t safe.

It’s worth noting that Web3 Antivirus, according to Dulub, doesn’t ask the user for access to their wallet, digital assets, or seed phrases.

The SaaS market is expected to reach close to $208 billion USD by 2023, according to Statista, with research showing more than 70% of the Series A funding rounds raised by B2B SaaS companies.

“Right now, crypto scams, Ponzi schemes, ICOs, and suspect NFT projects are hijacking the narrative of Web3,” says TouchBrick founder and CEO Shayra Antia.

TouchBrick is a data-driven cloud platform that came about in response to the increase of security incidents that have compromised blockchain protocols and smart contract layers.

In May, the company had a pre-seed round at an estimated $7 million USD valuation, led by a group of undisclosed institutional investors. Antia says that they are expecting to announce another seed round before the end of this year.

Taking Antia’s point and comparing it with the current landscape and recent collapse of FTX, the ongoing federal charges against the exchange and its disgraced former founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, has illuminated the harsh reality of today’s modern day Enron and the need to have a strong Web3 infrastructure that prioritizes SaaS and middleware in its future security.

“The industry is still focused on the financial model of cryptocurrency, but is unable to distinguish full-suite SaaS products that work to enable Web2/Web3 existing companies,” Antia explained.

Unfortunately, the majority of today’s industry available solutions currently target web developers, which positions TouchBrick as one of the industry’s first “no-code” solutions that specifically caters to business operators and tech executives including CTOs, VPs of Engineering, COOs, CIOs, and CEOs.

These solutions, according to the company’s website, can be integrated with other enterprise softwares like NetSuite and Salesforce.

“We also saw a need in the market for a simple way to create sophisticated projects without a developer through a ‘drag-and-drop’ manner for companies to take advantage of,” Antia emphasized.

TouchBrick CTO, Jason Melo, also says that come 2023, we should expect to see a shift in Web3’s overall business model – from a financial perspective of crypto and protocols towards platforms like TouchBrick that help progress internal ecosystems within organizations by tapping into these core data points.”

“Customers should be seeking out solutions that are built across a multi-chain ecosystem that is focused on delivering trustless no-code tokenization tools,” he added.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT

A.I., for example, has been the talk within the tech community for the past two months after the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

OpenAI, the AI startup founded by Elon Musk, built its first iteration of the chatbot, trained on massive pools of data that is allegedly able to answer any query a user might have.

Within the first week of ChatGPT’s launch, more than 1 million users had already interacted with the chatbot. In December, former Editor-In-Chief of Wired, Nicholas Thompson, shared a video post arguing that ChatGPT would take “search” and SEO to the next level, quickly overtaking Alphabet’s Google algorithm.

At the end of the day, SaaS should be Web3’s primary focus for 2023 so that innovation can thrive off Web2’s core business model of strong, basic fundamental layers of security and interoperability.