The interoperability space has been on a roller-coaster since its inception. In the last year alone, over a billion dollars were lost to bridge hacks, predominantly due to smart contract vulnerabilities. The space needed a radically new approach that goes beyond just audits or bug bounties for giving protocols the trust to build on bridges confidently.

We began SocketSurge with this radical thought - what if we put community at the centre of interoperability security?

And at the end of our month-long Wave 1, we are glad to have accomplished this by unifying builders, security experts, and auditors in a collaborative endeavour to test our protocol!

This collaborative effort also led to an unprecedented milestone in interop history:

A fully permissionless interoperability solution, operated by third-parties pre-mainnet

The Success of SocketSurge Wave 1

During the exhilarating four-week course of Wave 1 of Surge, we saw an incredible response of 14,000 registrations. Participants embarked on a treasure hunt for code-based Easter eggs and made bug discoveries, earning themselves SurgePasses and SurgePoints.

• Among the sea of talented participants, 300 developers stood out with their impressive experience and got shortlisted.

• From the 40 planted Easter eggs, 24 were successfully discovered, giving us a chance to identify potential future collaborators.

• The process led to the discovery of 15 bugs of various severity levels, enhancing the solidity of our contracts and shielding us against potential attack vectors in the future.

• 4 Lootboxes served as our battleground to simulate known hacks and rigorously push our fraud prevention mechanisms to their limits while offering rewards to those who strengthened our defences.

• We staked $77K in these Lootboxes as a testament to our confidence, and our Surgers did not disappoint, as they successfully claimed a hefty sum of $27K.

• Throughout this journey, Surgers accumulated an impressive total of 22,250 SurgePoints, a testament to their skills and dedication to securing SocketDL.

Owing to your relentless efforts, we've accomplished a landmark feat by testing our Protocol in a completely Permissionless setting, marking a milestone in the history of interoperability.

The Community-Secured Future

It's exciting to see what began as an experiment, has culminated into a community of builders and future Sentinels. This collective shall fortify our security-first approach and ensure SocketDL is continuously battle-tested before protocols are built upon it - not after.

We now look forward to congratulating the Surgers and letting the blockchain know of your invaluable contributions by bestowing the top performers on the leaderboard with their SocketSentinels NFTs.

To all our up-and-coming Sentinels, GEAR UP for Mainnet!