Today, we are proud to present Drosera: an Ethereum-native solution built by developers, for developers, to enable protocols and their communities to outsource application security infrastructure to the Ethereum operators that are already maintaining Ethereum consensus.
Since 2014, our industry has experienced exploit losses totaling nearly $80 billion.
Despite this, DeFi has shown massive resilience and latent potential to transform the financial system as we know it.
However, the security infrastructure that enables the promise of decentralized finance is severely lacking in myriad ways - with extensive centralization, cost-prohibitive design, little regard for composability, and extremely manual, ad-hoc requirements.
After raising $1.55 million in our initial funding round, we aim to deliver on the promise of decentralized security.
Understanding Drosera
Drosera is a trustless and decentralized project for detecting exploits and mitigating financial loss. It is an automation protocol that abstracts the complexity of creating monitoring systems, and automated response capability, for decentralized applications. Drosera offers a framework for creating and executing automated responses to events on the Ethereum network.
Our team has been working closely with the EigenLayer community as one of the first Actively Validated Services (AVS) on EigenLayer, with plans to use shared security via restaking to help further secure decentralized applications.
The vision for what Drosera will become is symbiotic: a biome, wherein a new economy of scale is born from the participation of protocols, their communities, operators, and restakers.
Operators win because they make more money and provide application layer security for Ethereum.
Protocols win by receiving dynamic, objective, and trustless security that is delivered around the clock - bolstered by voluntary participation from their community.
Restakers win by receiving yield for providing economic security using their assets.
Drosera wins because we generate rewards for protocol adoption.
Drosera's Unique Capabilities
Drosera is the world’s first decentralized automated responder collective (DARC), one that is directly native to the Ethereum trust network with a strong foundation that can be built upon.
Drosera empowers smart contracts with the ability to analyze a well-formatted history of on-chain data, allowing for the detection of invariants that change over time instead of just examining the current state of the blockchain. This capability enables the creation of sophisticated analysis that can detect a wide range of invariant conditions.
These smart contracts, called Traps, implement two functions: collect and isValid. The collect function gathers data from the blockchain and returns a struct containing the data points to monitor. The isValid function accepts an array of the returned struct and returns a boolean value. This function is called by the Operator on each new block with the collected data, and it is used to determine whether or not the Trap's response should be executed.
By using Solidity to structure traps, we not only equip developers and projects with a powerful security tool but introduce the potential for an entirely new discipline of security engineer in a Web3 context: Trappers, professionals who specialize in structuring the validation logic found for protocols and users.
General Use Cases
Drosera can create immediate value for several use cases:
For treasury management, a protocol can use Drosera to monitor the state of its treasury and execute an emergency response if the treasury is drained or if the funds are moved to an unauthorized address.
For lending platforms, projects can implement automated liquidation alerts and responses, the protocol can detect if a user's collateralization ratio drops below a critical level and initiate an automated response to either notify the user or trigger partial liquidation to avoid full liquidation.
For decentralized exchanges, you can create a system to detect unusual trading activity – the protocol can monitor trading volumes, liquidity, and pool data to identify potential market manipulation or unwanted bot activity and inform governance. This list is by no means comprehensive, but rather illustrative of straightforward use cases we typically highlight for our partners. We intend to do entire blog posts on the additional use cases Drosera offers to different profiles of protocols.
This list is by no means comprehensive, but rather illustrative of straightforward use cases we typically highlight for our partners. We intend to do entire blog posts on the additional use cases Drosera offers to different profiles of protocols.
Alignment
Drosera distinguishes itself as a community-aligned platform, simplifying the creation of monitoring systems for protocol developers. By solely leveraging Solidity, Drosera offers a streamlined approach that significantly reduces both cost and development time compared to traditional in-house solutions.
This seamless integration complements existing smart contract development tooling and workflows, enhancing efficiency without disrupting established processes.
In the realm of Ethereum, operators have a unique opportunity to contribute to the security and stability of the DeFi ecosystem. By running the Drosera Operator Client software, they can actively engage in the network's safeguarding. Opting into 'Traps'—a key feature of Drosera—allows these operators to not only play a crucial role in protecting the ecosystem but also to earn rewards for their contributions.
This innovative approach encourages active participation and provides tangible incentives, fostering a more secure and robust DeFi environment.##
Our Initial Funding Round
We would like to take this time to thank all the funds who are supporting us in realizing our vision:
- Anagram
- Arrington Capital
- UDHC
- Comfy Capital
- Bodhi Ventures
- Metamatic
- BaseDAO
- Asymmetric
- Zeal Capital
- Everstake
- 01Node
- Marin Ventures
- Infinite Capital
- NxGen
As well as some of our esteemed angel investors who help make this possible:
- Santiago Santos
- Andrew Van der Werff (Brevan Howard)
- Eli Krunzke (Exonumia)
- Mike Silagadze (Co-Founder Ether.fi)
- Rok Kopp (Co-Founder Ether.fi)
- Valeyo (Co-Founder Quasar)
- Karel Kubat (Founder Union)
- Marc Weinstein (Partner, Mechanism Capital)
- Adam Patel (Former Blockchain Capital)
- Chris Battenfield (Head of Product, Obol)
- Jack Sun, Tanthai Pongstein, Josh Han (Wonderstruck)
- Dylan CZ (Pond)
- Sebastien Davies (Aquanow)
- Flywheel
Here’s what some of our investors has to say in support for the project:
"The Drosera team are true pioneers in revolutionizing web3 security. By spearheading the development of the first EVM-native threat monitoring and incident response protocol, Drosera is architecting a critical security backbone for Ethereum applications and we are thrilled to support Drosera as they build the security infrastructure that will redefine standards for all Ethereum-based applications. Embracing the ethos of web3, Drosera ensures that security evolves in tandem with innovation and community, paving a safe way for broad adoption of decentralized applications." - Michael Arrington, Founder of Arrington Capital
"As the world of retaking and shared security expands to change the innovation landscape in crypto - and therefore the world - insurance, and security/risk measures will be the most important factors for the success of these new ecosystems. Drosera is the first company to tackle dynamic risk markets uniquely and will change the game for risk management in crypto generally." - Joe Eagan, Co-Founder of Anagram
If you have any questions or would like to learn more about Drosera, please feel free to reach out to us on our Discord channels or on X. We are always happy to help and engage with the community.