The Guardian Team
The people behind every engagement.
The researchers, engineers, and operators securing tens of billions in onchain value, and building the tooling that moves the field forward.
19 Guardians
The high impact team setting the pace for onchain security.
Research, fuzzing, offchain security, and operations — select anyone to read their record.
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Co-founded Guardian and drove its fuzzing research — the invariant work that now sits inside every audit.
- Hundreds of Critical and High issues found through fuzzing practice
- Fuzzing suites for EigenLayer, GMX, Yuga Labs, Synthetix, and USDT0
- Shaped the approach behind Sentry, Guardian’s Web3 DevSecOps platform
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A tenacious sales leader, passionate about driving the future of financial security.
- Leads Guardian’s sales team
- A decade of enterprise technology sales before Guardian, at HP and Oracle
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An organized and savvy operations leader with extensive cybersecurity service experience.
- Co-founder and CEO of HackTricks, one of the most popular cybersecurity training sites
- Level-headed, pragmatic leader
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World-class pentester and coach across all cybersecurity domains, Head of Offchain Services at Guardian.
- Co-founded and built HackTricks training into one of the most popular online cybersecurity training and certification sites
- Coached team Europe to victory in ICC 2025 in Japan
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Came to Web3 from elite red team work — payload development and EDR bypass — and reviews protocols with the same offensive habits.
- Led Halborn’s EVM audit team for two years; Lead Security Researcher at Spearbit
- Live Critical disclosures, including one with eight figures of TVL at risk
- Optimism, USDT0, Uniswap, GMX, Synthetix, Ethena
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Offensive reviews across an unusually wide spread of stacks — Cosmos and other Go projects, Ethereum, Sway.
- Led dozens of reviews in Halborn’s Special Operations department
- Story Protocol, Synthetix, Ethereal, Entangle Labs
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A whitehat with a disclosure record — live Criticals reported to Beanstalk, Pinto, and Fluid.
- Unique Critical in the Fuel Blockchain Attackathon, contributing to a $156,000+ whitehat reward
- Deep experience across both Rust and EVM logic
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Before entering Web3, Nicholas served as an Air Force pilot, bringing leadership experience shaped by mission-critical operational environments.
- Over three years of DeFi and perps exchange security experience
- Audits for major protocols including Tether, Synthetix, and Jupiter, and multiple top finishes in public audit contests
- Previously built production DeFi vaults as a Solidity engineer
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A renowned security researcher in the Web3 space, having won countless public security contests and previously co-founded a popular Web3 security firm himself.
- Placed #1 in audit competitions for Wormhole, Pump.fun, Yearn Finance, DeBank, and more
- Previously co-founded the Web3 security firm Obsidian, with a strong track record of client service
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Leads Guardian’s fuzzing practice. The frameworks, the open-source tooling, and the research into autonomous testing pipelines.
- Researching Ethereum consensus and application layers since 2019
- Adversarial bot races, and among the first to automate testing in EVM fuzzing
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One of the most experienced smart contract fuzzing engineers in the industry, with the expertise to get a full invariant suite covering key edge cases running from the beginning of an audit.
- More than 2.5 years focused on fuzzing smart contract systems, and on developing Guardian’s approach to smart contract fuzzing
- Gives auditors a strong foundation to formalize the core invariants a protocol must uphold
- Often leads to the discovery of subtle edge cases that escape even the strongest manual reviewers or current state-of-the-art models
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Deep experience across cross-chain infrastructure, stablecoins, lending, exchanges, and derivatives.
- #1 on the Codehawks leaderboard for 2023; first place in the Liquity V2 contest
- LayerZero, Tether USDT0, M0, Liquity, GMX
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Specialises in advanced and novel DeFi integrations — the seams where protocols meet other protocols.
- Three years of DeFi security; a significant role in securing billions for Guardian clients
- Synthetix, LayerZero, USDT0, Story Protocol
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Applies an attacker-focused mindset to identify vulnerabilities, challenge protocol assumptions, and analyze complex system designs.
- Focused on smart contract security research since transitioning from frontend development in 2023, with multiple first-place finishes in competitive auditing contests and several critical vulnerabilities uncovered
- Experience spanning AMMs, cross-chain protocols, staking, and reward distribution mechanisms; primarily Solidity on EVM chains, with experience reviewing Solana-based protocols
- Baseline, LayerZero, Synthetix, Yellow, and Jupiter
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Came to onchain security from Web2, and brings that wider view of a system to the protocols he reviews.
- Excels at manual analysis, and performs especially well within team-based reviews
- A top performer across more than a dozen engagements since mid-2025
- Unique High and Critical findings for Universal, Synthetix, Ethena, and LayerZero
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Known for leaving no stone unturned, combining fuzzing tools such as Echidna with extreme diligence for production scenarios to surface edge-case vulnerabilities that manual review alone would miss.
- A consistent top performer in Guardian reviews since the start of 2024
- A strong offensive mindset backed by pragmatic protocol experience, having previously been a lead protocol developer at a popular perps exchange
- Roughly three years in the field, across GMX, Synthetix, Bounce, M0, and USDT0, among others — a Web3 developer’s implementation-level understanding of the systems he audits, reasoned from both an attacker’s and a builder’s perspective