Why we are Bitcoin first
We had the experience to audit anything. We chose to be best at one network.
By Bashir Abu-Amr
Verified by Humans is a Bitcoin-first security audit team. That was a choice, not a default, and it is worth saying why.
The network we believe in
Plenty of things drew people to crypto. What captured my co-founders and me was decentralized technology itself, and what it could do for the world if it worked. We came to believe that ethos is best embodied in Bitcoin: byzantine fault tolerant, permissionless, censorship resistant.
The market has reached the same conclusion, for whatever that is worth on its own. Bitcoin carries the largest market capitalization of any blockchain, and it has endured more bull and bear cycles and more world-changing events than anything built since.
Admiring it from a distance was not the point
We did not simply love Bitcoin. We invested in becoming the best at auditing the teams building on it.
We had options. Between us we had audited hundreds of EVM smart contracts, dozens of wallets, and a long list of cryptographic implementations and consensus mechanisms. That experience is real, and we still draw on it every week. But when we had the opportunity to chart our own course at Defense by Thesis, we pointed it at the technology we actually believed in.
What that has meant in practice
Since then we have supported teams shipping serious products on Bitcoin. We have also written for the people doing the same work as us: practitioners auditing Bitcoin systems, and developers stepping into unfamiliar territory the first time they integrate it. The Bitcoin security auditing report we published is where most of that is collected.
Where it goes next
Technology evolves in ways nobody schedules, and a first principle is not a refusal to learn. Recently we have been working on crypto rails built to serve regulated financial institutions and markets. There is a great deal of work to be done there, and it is genuinely interesting. Our work in the Canton network ecosystem is the clearest example of where that has taken us.
The principle has not moved. Find the systems where correctness carries real consequence, learn them deeply enough to catch what tooling cannot, and have a human read every line.