Is Everstake Safe?

Staking cryptocurrency with a reputable company like Everstake can be a secure way to earn rewards on your holdings. One key reason it’s considered safe to stake with Everstake is its comprehensive approach to security and transparency.

Since its early years, Everstake has been known for its strict approach to security and infrastructure resilience, which helped it secure its reputation as a highly reliable staking provider and validator. 

Those factors alone, however, cannot account for ensuring the utter security and safety of staked funds. This article, therefore, sheds some light on the measures Everstake takes to make its services and operations as safe as possible.

Security Level 1

Everstake’s smart contracts have been audited by industry-recognized security companies like ChainSecurity and Ackee, which concluded that they were free from vulnerabilities and used best security practices. 

This, however, would hardly be enough, so Everstake has its own series of internal audits as well as a dedicated security program covering penetration testing, simulated social engineering campaigns, security hardening measures, and more.

For instance, penetration testing simulates real-world attacks on the company’s systems, which is crucial for estimating the efficiency of the current security measures. On the other hand, simulated social engineering campaigns test the most vulnerable point in the entire security system: the human factor. This enables our infosec team to prepare every employee at Everstake against phishing attacks and other underhanded tactics. On top of that, as a measure of additional external control, Everstake has an unofficial bug bounty program for whitehat hackers who get to find any vulnerabilities in the company’s infrastructure and applications.

All this, however, is but a general policy that strengthens Everstake’s safety and security. Other measures cover more specific nuances, which are no less important.

Technological Safety

Everstake takes specific measures to ensure the comprehensive safety of its infrastructure and operations. Most of these measures are considered confidential for security reasons; however, they can still be described in a generalized form.

Efficient Team Structure for the DevOps Department

By organizing the DevOps department in a specific way, Everstake can ensure that CI/CD practices are followed 24/7. The team structure enables quick decision-making and timely responses to any technical issues that may arise on Everstake’s side or in any of the supported blockchains on a global level.

Global Infrastructure and Team Distribution 

Everstake’s servers and other infrastructure are located on every continent except Antarctica. This ensures high availability and redundancy, which protect the company’s services from interruptions for technical, natural, or even political reasons.

You can rest assured that your assets remain secure, regardless of the situation in Ukraine. Everstake has no servers located in Ukraine, and all of our core team members and critical employees operate from locations outside the country. Our infrastructure is distributed across global data centers, ensuring that everything stays operational no matter what.

This setup guarantees that your assets are always under your control, and the ongoing situation in Ukraine will not affect your ability to manage, unstake, or move your funds. Your security and access to your assets will remain intact, regardless of external circumstances.

Load Balancers and Proximity Steering 

Everstake distributes network traffic evenly across servers and optimizes response times by directing users to their nearest server. These measures not only speed up all interactions but also massively enhance the resilience of the infrastructure by eliminating any single point of failure.

Advanced Monitoring Solutions 

Everstake uses several suites of advanced monitoring solutions to continuously oversee the health and performance of all systems. Those solutions can detect anomalies or performance issues at their onset so the team can address and eliminate them before they escalate. This is one of the reasons why Everstake has maintained its historical uptime at 99.9% for six years.

RPC/API Clusters 

Everstake uses RPCs and APIs to enhance the scalability and reliability of the supported services and handle large volumes of requests without risking overloading the system. Thanks to that, Everstake can always ensure safe and highly responsive operations with high uptime.

Custom Logs for Each Service 

Everstake uses customized logging for each of its services and every supported blockchain. This massively speeds up debugging as all the data required to identify and rectify issues is always on hand. As a result, all possible disruptions to services are minimized.

On-Call Team 

Finally, Everstake has a dedicated on-call team that can respond within minutes should any problems arise. This massively boosts the company’s operational efficiency and resilience and speeds up the resolution of issues. Essentially, the problems are usually solved long before users notice them.

All those measures are invaluable in ensuring Everstake’s utmost safety and reliability. That said, they are still not enough, and another group of policies and solutions is vital for the security of the company’s services.

Procedural Safety

It is crucial to address problems, promptly foresee them, and take measures to tackle them most efficiently. This is why Everstake also has a vast set of policies outlining any possible incident, the ways to avoid it, and the action that needs to be taken in case something happens nonetheless.

Business Continuity 

Everstake has a comprehensive business continuity policy that ensures it can continue its operations under extremely adverse conditions. The policy’s efficiency was particularly proven when the war broke out in Ukraine in 2022. Everstake’s reputation, combined with the suite of preemptive measures prompted by this policy, ensured that there were no interruptions in the company’s services. 

Incident Response 

Everstake’s incident response protocol is another complex strategy depicting preemptive measures and reactions to any incidents and unexpected events. With a well-prepared incident response team and a plan for any conceivable disaster or trouble, Everstake can quickly address any issues.

Slashing Protection

As a staking provider, Everstake has a separate policy aimed at protecting against slashing. This policy is paramount for the company since slashing can occur for reasons beyond the validator’s control. It lists all measures that minimize the risk of penalties, varying from technological to addressing potential human error. The policy is continuously updated. As a result, Everstake has never been slashed in Ethereum since its PoS genesis.

Information Security 

Finally, Everstake has a separate information security policy that aims to protect the integrity of the company’s operation, especially against hacks and other malicious attacks. The policy describes encryption, access controls, security audits, employee training programs, and more. 

Conclusion

Combined, all those measures ensure that Everstake is ultimately safe. Having maintained its reputation for over six years, the company’s reliability and safety are additionally confirmed by its Staking Rewards AAA SR Rating and membership in the Secure Staking Alliance.

Finally, Everstake’s services are non-custodial, so users never lose control of their assets. As a result, Everstake can be considered one of the safest choices for staking currently available in the industry.