Behind Lines of Code: Interview with Domantas Pelaitis, Technology Lead @ Lossless

5 min readAug 19, 2022

If you’re reading this, you must have already seen your fair share of updates from Lossless — announcements of new functionalities, partnerships, or our insights into relevant industry news.

Although such visibility is the lifeblood of every Web3 startup, what the community does not see is equally important. An enormous amount of work goes into ensuring all operations run smoothly and product development is completed within the estimated timescales.

Following the Private Beta launch of our latest security product — Aegis — we have decided it was time for a sneak peek into the “backend” of the company. To this end, we have sat down with Domantas Pelaitis, our Technology Lead, for an insider’s perspective.

What has the Lossless journey been like since the inception of the company?

Although Lossless is still a relatively young company, it feels that so much has happened already. It started with a few of us joining in on a call to discuss the current security issues in Web3. A few weeks later, I was already coding our LSS ERC20 token and preparing for our IDO. After a few early successes, we just kept going, welcoming new team members and making plans for the future.

The journey has been eventful and fast-paced. I remember drafting the architecture behind the Lossless Protocol and thinking this would take ages to build. But here we are in 2022, and we have a fully-functional Lossless protocol that has already helped to prevent hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses. And we are already onto our next product — Aegis — that will patch up yet another giant hole in DeFi security.

What does it mean to be a CTO of a Web3 security-oriented company?

It sure is very different from holding a Tech Lead role in any other technology company. Web3 is a very young industry, and Web3 security tooling is almost non-existent. Here at Lossless, we sometimes do feel what I can only imagine Web2 visionaries felt. To illustrate, I remember reading a 2001 essay by Paul Graham, where he explains why the next generation of software may be server-based. Remember, in his time, server-side rendering was simply not a thing. Nevertheless, you won’t see anyone buying CDs to install Facebook or Twitter. Nowadays, server-based software is a standard that we don’t even think about. In this way, I also think of my job as turning new ideas into go-to, common-sense solutions.

What drives you?

Everyone at Lossless shares the same moral purpose — we do what we do to protect communities from malicious exploits and the associated financial loss. Getting hacked and losing your hard-earned money is one of the worst feelings one can experience in this digitized world. If I can help prevent at least a small fraction of these exploits, that’s all I need to keep going.

Give me an instance of what happens behind the scenes. What doesn’t the community see?

We have plenty of good stories. For example, exactly one day before the Aegis Private Beta release, we noticed that some of our backend applications stopped processing transactions. This was happening for all of the chains we were monitoring. Strangely, it wasn’t throwing any errors. The applications simply seemed halted. I’m not going to lie — it was a stressful day. Many thoughts were racing through our heads. Was there some sort of bug that we weren’t aware of? Can we fix it by tomorrow? Do we feel confident releasing an application that had such a major outage just the day before the release?

Later, it turned out that the fault lay with our blockchain data provider, which decided to shut down its blockchain nodes without notice. Despite our understandable frustration, this was also a moment of relief since we realized the issue was not on our end. A quick switch to another data provider service fixed everything. Situations like these are always quite stressful in the moment but quite fun to reflect on.

What are the most important trends emerging in Web3 security?

One trend I’m pleased about is that more and more people now recognize that Web3 security is not just audits. Don’t get me wrong, regular code audits are good practice, but smart contract security is so much more than that. The current market is saturated with pre-deployment security solutions, but there are very few post-deployment security tools. In this sense, Lossless is definitely a trendsetter. Over time, our goal is to make the post-deployment security tooling ecosystem as robust as that of traditional Web2.

How did the idea behind Aegis come to be?

While working on the Lossless on-chain protocol, we have amassed substantial knowledge about the most common attack vectors, types of exploits, and their patterns. We’ve also realized that the need for integration severely limited the scope of our protocol. Naturally, we began digging around to see how we could improve. To our surprise, we discovered that there was simply no threat monitoring solution for small and medium-sized projects. It was hard to believe that projects with hundreds of millions of dollars in TVL didn’t have even a simple monitoring system that would notify them in case of an incident. After realizing this was a clear gap in the market, we began to build such a solution ourselves.

What are the challenges facing the industry that still need to be overcome?

I’m a bit biased, but I think the major challenge is still… security! People must first trust Web3-based systems as much as they trust Web2-based banking services. Without such confidence in security, mainstream adoption remains a distant dream.

What does the future hold for Lossless?

We never know what the fast-paced future of DeFi holds. I wouldn’t say I like committing to specific milestones that might prove to be outdated in the next three months. At the moment, it’s all about Aegis, which we will be publicly releasing very soon. Right now, it still remains in a “minimum viable product” state. Looking at the internal roadmap, I can tell you we’re only perhaps 5% there. Nevertheless, I remain very bullish on all the exciting new stuff we will be releasing in the upcoming months.

About Lossless

Restoring trust in web3 security. Lossless incorporates a new layer of blockchain transaction security, protecting projects and their communities from malicious exploits and the associated financial loss.

Lossless protocol implements an additional layer of blockchain transaction security for ERC-20 standard tokens, mitigating the financial impact of smart contract exploits and private key theft. Lossless protocol utilizes community-driven threat identification tools and a unique stake-based reporting system to identify suspicious transactions, providing real-time protection.