Guides
What a buyer needs to know before commissioning an audit: what it costs, how to read the report, and what to have ready.
What proof of reserves actually proves
It answers one question narrowly and is read as answering a much larger one. What the method establishes, what it cannot reach, and how to judge somebody else's.
What audits a bridge protocol needs
A bridge is several systems that have to agree, and most of them are not the contracts. What to commission, what each engagement covers, and the order that makes each one cheaper than the last.
Web3 penetration testing
The contract is the most reviewed part of a crypto product and the smallest part of its attack surface. What a penetration test covers, and why the paths it finds rarely touch the chain.
Under-constrained circuits
The failure where the proof is valid and the statement is false. Zero-knowledge systems fail quietly, and the verifier agrees.
Governance capture
The class where nothing breaks. The mechanism is used exactly as designed, by someone whose interests differ from the people who designed it.
Bridge trust assumptions
The highest aggregate losses in the industry, and mostly not contract bugs. A bridge is an agreement between systems that cannot check each other.
Access control and upgrade paths
Where the largest single losses sit, and the class least likely to be a bug. Most of it is the system working as designed, for the wrong person.
Oracle manipulation and stale feeds
Two different failures, routinely treated as one. An attacker moving a price and a feed that stopped moving need opposite defences.
Reentrancy
Understood since 2016, fixed by a three-line pattern, and still shipping. Why the defence fails more often than the mechanism is misunderstood.
How protocols lose money
The defect classes that actually cost funds, organised by what the attacker is doing rather than by what the bug is called.
How audit pricing works
What determines the price of a security review, the models you will be quoted under, and the questions worth asking before you accept one.
How to prepare for a smart contract audit
Preparation is the part of the engagement you control, and the part that moves the price. What to have ready before you ask for a quote.
Audit or bug bounty: which, and when
Two instruments with different coverage models. What each one proves, what neither proves, and why the order they run in decides what they cost.
How to read a smart contract audit report
Severity scales, scope statements, commit hashes, and the sections most people skip. Explained against reports you can open in the next tab.