Steve Bassi, PolySwarm Founder and CEO
As all things blockchain and crypto currency continue to dramatically rise, some of the most interesting startups are utilizing blockchain to revolutionize existing markets. Applying blockchain technology to better serve global security needs is a passion that has seen Steve Bassi found a potential industry game changer. As the CEO of PolySwarm, Bassi wanted to create a decentralized, distributed marketplace, where security experts could compete to solve world wide security threats.
Having been an entrepreneur and hacker from the age of 15, Bassi knew not only how to build a team, but also the technology to rally around a category changing idea. He previously founded Narf Industries, an information security R&D firm with clients including DARPA and Fortune 500 companies. From 2011 he was an early aficionado for Bitcoin and grew to love the space.
When creating PolySwarm, the team saw the opportunity to build a marketplace, in some ways similar to Amazon's Mechanical Turk, but specifically to combat security threats. Security experts are incentivized by "bounties", and compete to offer protection from cyber and information threats.
Where it becomes particularly compelling and scalable, is that these security experts can come from any market, be it the Philippines, Sweden or Germany. And with this geographic scope and inclusion, comes scale. No matter what language a security expert speaks, malicious threats all reduce to ones and zeros, levelling the playing field in an increasingly borderless world.
By bringing together a global network of anti malware experts, today's most pressing security threats can be combatted from near infinite numbers of angles, to create the best protection and solutions. Think Bitcoin, but instead of mining, experts compete against security situations.
With the rise of blockchain and smart contracts comes an opportunity to build borderless, decentralized market places. For PolySwarm this has meant the startup could create a much more complete threat detection and response umbrella to protect users. It's more complete because security experts can produce deep, but narrow, software solutions that when combined produce a much broader umbrella than a solution from today's single vendor marketplace. It's potentially a game changer in identifying malicious activity and international threats to security.
As we are seeing a meteoric rise in blockchain technologies, what other worldwide problems can be addressed by decentralized, borderless communities, working together to build solutions?