#DYOR — The fight for legitimacy!

5 min readJul 8, 2021

**The need for the World’s 1st Decentralized Audit Yield Farm!**

The Decentralized Finance or simply put — DeFi sector is a nascent space growing massively to a TVL (Total Volume Locked) of over $100 Billion as per DefiLlama stats (at the time of writing); of which Yield Farming has grown to be one of the fastest growing spaces in DeFi. The percolation of these Yield Farms across multiple chains is frenetic. Also, the way the community rallies across these projects trying to take advantage of the high yields, first mover strategy of a prospective multi-bagger is a testament to a boundless, decentralized market.

This is the closest we can have to an efficient market not bound by red tape and a crony capitalist regulatory structure.

However the same boundlessness that enables fast discovery of solutions, alpha and subsequent intense growth of the tech has been exploited by bad actors repeatedly to the chagrin of trusting investors. A yield farmer is a brave risk taker that uses his/her capital to stake in a farm taking advantage of the high yields. The capital is used as liquidity for the trading pairs or just staked in a way that boosts the token price. Some sell for quick gains and many HODL because they trust in the team and their roadmap. They do it in an environment where hackers are on the prowl for even the tiniest, high-reward exploits.

A top 10 leader-board of DeFi protocols that have fallen victim to attack, exploit or arbitrage — **Source :rekt.news**

But that faith in a secure vision has repeatedly been broken not just by hackers but by the treachery of the team itself.

According to a report by CipherTrace, “In the second half of 2020, nearly 99% of major fraud and misappropriations volume stemmed from DeFi protocols performing rug pulls and exit scams.”

There’s no doubt that this percentage will continue to grow in 2021; considering the number of incidents that have already transpired this year.

Compounder Finance, a so-called smart farming project with additional rewards of CP3R tokens, had a lot of hype in the DeFi space in late 2020. The team, post an audit from Solidity Finance managed to steal $10.8 Million from investors by replacing the audited code with Evil Strategy code. Though the auditors and some community members had highlighted the suspicious time lock setup, it was too late.

In order to stem the growing number of rug pulls and low trust, projects and investors turned to auditors for their reports. Their word was to be the gold standard of trust for investors to participate in a project. This lead to the rise of multiple audit firms like Certik, PeckShield and TechRate. Even community based auditors like RugDetectives, RugDoc managed to get a fair bit of credibility. But the problem is most of the time, their word means squat if not evaluated properly by the community.

Why ?

Inspite of their reports and the fancy Twitter posts with the neon green SAFE for these projects, auditors can’t really give a green light about the security of a project. Sometimes the auditors are sloppy in their analysis and if the community doesn’t keep up, then it’s a free honeypot for hackers. A certain auditor company (we’re not disclosing the name) does free audits to get clients and it highlights that it isn’t as comprehensive as their paid version. Projects take advantage of it, get the credibility of a free audit report while having back-doors to a new unsubmitted code and befuddle investors. Sometimes the team exploits post audit as well (seen with Compounder Finance) and rug pulls investor funds with poor communication from the audit firms.

Most investors consider the whole auditor situation as the equivalent of the role of Moody’s, S&Ps audit rating in the inflation of risky mortgage securities in 2008. The standard hasn’t evolved even in the cryptocurrency markets, so can’t blame investors for thinking that way!

All in all, the key values that are still missing are:

1. A dynamic community over the reliance of a so called trusted name.

2. Evolving security standards.

3. A panel of community led security researchers and auditors.

4. A transparent audit system that caters to the COMMUNITY, not the projects from whom it gets paid.

5. Simplified and effective communication system between the auditors and investors.

All of the above remain to be critical values that don’t exist in the system.

Well, we have a solution and DYOR Audit is the name!

DYOR Audit is The First ever Decentralized Audit Yield Farm looking to integrate and incentivize these values with the $DYOR Token at the heart of our system.

It is a gestating vision led by us as a consequence of some of our own team members getting our hands burnt by crooked yield farms. We have gone through the utter despair that you, the, yield farmers face even till this very day!

We have a team that offers cost effective audits for the project done in the initial phase of our roadmap. The payment is initiated through the staking of the $DYOR Token and the status of the audits are updated on site for all to see. The industry graded security standards are made transparent for all and community inputs that help evolve the audit for the better is rewarded. This is an open source incentive for the best minds in the security and audit space to come together and accelerate security practice upgrades!

We want accountability for the entire Crypto-Space!

And we understand the thankless role of the crypto community to deliver it in the absence of regulations. It is no longer a thankless, no reward job with the $DYOR Token stepping in to recognize and remunerate the true heroes of our fascinating community! Bounty initiatives can be offered to reward the members who provide accurate information about bad actors and illicit behavior from projects.

It is recorded in our site as a reliable, ever growing database for investors. A feature which the space desperately needs.

The community can also be rewarded for auditing coins, tokens and smart contracts through the $DYOR Token in the later stages of the roadmap. For that, time has to be spent developing a community chosen panel of top grade security researchers who’re in line with the vision and the community.

By doing this, the subsequent role of our team in the involvement of future audits is put in the hands of the community paving the way for a truly decentralized, meritocratic audit system.

Our ambitious vision can be a reality with your involvement.

Let’s come together and make the Crypto-Space safe once and for all with #DYOR!