While many forms of cryptocurrency have declined in value this year, there is still a way to make money from it: auditing code for hacks, bugs and other weaknesses that can be planted and exploited by savvy individuals or rogue states.

This industry is booming, Bloomberg reported, due to increased activity by the likes of North Korea, which stole $400 million of crypto in 2021, as well as other sophisticated hackers, who have made off with roughly $2 billion from digital-asset protocols this year alone.

The dangers are heightened with the emergence of Web3, which is built on crypto technology.

Riding to the rescue—albeit at a hefty price—are security service firms such as Morpho Labs, which has performed more than 10 code audits in the past year, its CEO claims. One firm, ConsenSys, charges up to $320,000 for an audit, with some clients waiting as long as nine months for their turn. Another, Trail of Bits, hiked its fees by 20 to 25 percent, and another, OpenZeppelin, increased its workforce by almost two thirds.

Venture capital firms have gotten into the act, investing $257 million into crypto auditing and security companies so far this year, up from $185 million for all of 2021, according to CB Insights.

Salaries for experienced blockchain auditors can run as high as $400,000 a year for their services, which involve “reviews of code by experienced developers who scrutinize it to identify bugs, security concerns and other issues that could make the technology run in unintended ways. In some cases, the protocol’s developer can fix the weaknesses pinpointed, and then have those patches reviewed by the auditor.”

The rewards to the firms are pretty lucrative, too. Identifying significant flaws can cost as much as $10 million in fees, claims an executive at Immunefi, which calls itself “Web3’s leading bug bounty platform, protecting $100 billion in user funds.”