Web3 with Sam Kamani
372: The Security Mistakes Every Web3 Founder Makes (And How to Avoid Them) with Guest Speaker Johnathon Claudius from Asymmetric Research
23 Mar 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: How did Asymmetric Research evolve from Jump Crypto?
hello innovators entrepreneurs and risk takers welcome to another episode of web3 with sam kamani podcast and today on this podcast episode i am interviewing jonathan claudius from asymmetric research where he is going to be sharing about what every founder every builder or every person should be careful about when it comes to security there are a lot more security vulnerabilities created because of
llms and just how the industry is moving so he talks about what we should be thinking about how we should be thinking about the whole architecture as well as day-to-day things that we can do in order to be more secure and as well as at the same time it doesn't cost us speed that we can still build and progress faster
As always, nothing that we talk about in this conversation should be taken as investment advice and please like, share, subscribe and follow. With all that out of the way, let's get into it. So Jonathan, welcome to the show.
Chapter 2: What real incident did Asymmetric Research handle with the Interchain Foundation?
It's great to have you here. Looking forward to talking about everything that you guys are building at Asymmetric Research. But before we get into it, I would love to learn a bit more about your journey.
Chapter 3: What new security threats are emerging from LLMs and AI agents?
What led to Asymmetric Research? How did you end up with building that?
Yeah, well, first, thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here. How we got here?
Chapter 4: What are the easy security wins every Web3 founder should implement?
So asymmetric research is about two years old. Before asymmetric research, Felix and I, my co-founder on the asymmetric research, we were both working at Jump at the time. So we were working at a trading firm.
Chapter 5: How can founders balance shipping speed with security rigor?
We were working... basically to help a lot of their venture bets, really, in the ecosystem. We were helping shape a lot of those in terms of, like, do they have a good holistic security program in place? So basically transitioning from that space into kind of a commercial enterprise was a bit of a shift for us.
But basically moving into sort of a commercial enterprise, it basically allowed us to take that same strategy that we were deploying and sort of like the sort of the shepherding side of like the VC relationship into like how we commercialize asymmetric research. And at the time, there were a lot of
Chapter 6: What laptop security measures should every team adopt?
There's a lot of product market fit for audit firms. I think at least by the time we had started asymmetric research, it was table stakes. No one's going to put money into these protocols and not expect to see some sort of audit artifact and be able to review the report. So that was table stakes. But what we realized was that there was a certain kind of buyer out there that wanted more.
And I think you probably also know this in your work is that you don't make security decisions
um in this convenient window right uh this convenient window when the audit's going on so for a lot of the engagements that we have it's really um it's an active conversation it's a daily process it's something that we do like going to the gym every day right it's we're constantly working on these programs and that's how our engagements are structured
Chapter 7: What lessons should founders learn about building finance and business development systems?
Fantastic. Yes, yes, I do. I am familiar with jump. I'm jump trading or jump crypto and all that. And very, very true. It's like, you know, security is is so big in our space because when you decentralize things and you make everything transparent and permissionless, so it allows people to read and do things and all that.
So it's like, I mean, and also security is quite a big, there's so many different aspects to it.
Chapter 8: What practical advice does the guest offer for improving security in Web3 projects?
What particular problems do you guys solve at Asymmetric? And what is something that you guys are doing that others are not?
Sure.
I mean, I think
I think what you mentioned there, basically, security is a very diverse topic. I talk to folks all the time about this subject because I think security is one of the most interesting industries to me because it's so multidisciplinary, meaning that when we meet people and we're interviewing folks to join our team, the big question that...
that people come to us and be like, well, hey, my background's in this. I come from a trading background, or I come from a systems administration background. I come from these different areas. But because security is so multidisciplinary, you really need this super diverse team to come together to sort of solve some of the problems that we might see with our clients.
And I think for a lot of the engagements that we have, our clients usually engage us to start with... They usually have a very specific ask. They say, you know, hey, I've got this thing over here. There's so many hundreds of millions of dollars in here. I read on the news last week that there was a hack. I'm uncomfortable with this amount of money that I'm now in custody of, right? Yes.
So for us, we'll usually start to get into an engagement through that process. And I think that's where a lot of the audit firms will get engaged in that they have a thing, there's a lot of money in it, they're making changes to it, and they want kind of a stamp, if you will.
For us, however, I think the big differentiator is that for our scopes of work, they're not really tightly scoped, meaning that what we're doing with clients is that we're working with them in a dedicated capacity. So when we work with them in that dedicated capacity, the idea is that like the problem of the day is the problem of the week is the problem that we're trying to solve. Right.
It's not it's a bit more. And I think if clients had to engage us on every single problem, we would lose a lot of velocity, right? That I think we gain by being durably engaged over a long period of time. So I think the different part is that we're really focusing on making sure that they have a good holistic story, like everything, right?
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