Technology Security, Pillar 03
The most expensive line of code in history was one that was never supposed to be callable. Smart contract vulnerabilities are not theoretical, they are the direct cause of billions in documented losses, and they are found through methodical, expert audit before deployment, not after an exploit.
A thorough smart contract audit combines three complementary methodologies. Static analysis tools, Slither, Mythril, and proprietary scanners, systematically traverse your codebase for known vulnerability patterns: reentrancy, integer overflow and underflow, improper access control, unsafe external calls, and dozens of other EVM-specific issues. Dynamic analysis through fuzz testing with Echidna and Foundry's fuzzing harness generates thousands of edge-case inputs to find the unexpected states your logic was not designed to handle. Manual expert review by security engineers who think like attackers covers the business logic vulnerabilities, economic attack vectors, and protocol-specific risks that no automated tool can model.
Our smart contract audit service covers the full spectrum from pre-deployment code review through post-launch monitoring advisory. We work across Solidity, Vyper, and Rust-based chains, including upgradeable proxy patterns, complex DeFi interactions, and cross-chain bridge contracts, the highest-risk architecture in Web3.
Work is delivered through our internal consultancy team and a curated network of specialist partner firms, rigorously vetted for technical depth and professional integrity in the Web3 space.
One Line. $320 Million.
“Wormhole's 2022 breach came down to a single deprecated Solana function left callable after a code upgrade. The attacker minted 120,000 wETH, worth $320M, without depositing collateral. No funds were at risk during development. The vulnerability only existed in the deployed state. A pre-deployment smart contract audit of the upgrade diff would have caught it.”
Euler Finance Had Been Audited. Four Times.
“Euler Finance had passed four separate security audits before its March 2023 exploit. The donation mechanism vulnerability that enabled the $197M flash loan attack, a sequence of deposit, self-liquidation, and donation operations that left an artificially large bad debt position the attacker could then liquidate profitably, was not caught by any of the four audit firms or by the automated tools they used. Static analysis cannot model the economic consequences of adversarial transaction sequences. The vulnerability was only identifiable by an auditor thinking specifically about how an attacker might interact with the combined mechanics of the protocol.”
A smart contract audit is not a box to tick before launch, it is a security investment in a system that may control hundreds of millions of dollars and cannot be patched in real time without a governance process. The cost of a thorough audit is trivially small relative to the value at risk.
The Methodology
Smart contract vulnerabilities cluster into four categories. A complete audit addresses all of them, automated tools cover the first reliably, and expert manual review is required for the rest.
Reentrancy, integer overflow and underflow, unchecked return values, unsafe delegatecall, tx.origin authentication, unprotected self-destruct, and the catalogue of known EVM vulnerability classes. Detected primarily through static analysis with manual verification.
Missing function modifiers, incorrect role assignments, admin key exposure, initialiser vulnerabilities, and proxy upgrade permission gaps. Who can call what, and what they can do with that access, mapped against what is actually intended by the protocol design.
Flash loan attack paths, price oracle manipulation, MEV exposure, front-running and sandwich attacks, liquidity pool manipulation, and incentive mechanism failures. These require modelling how an economically rational attacker would interact with your protocol across multiple transactions.
How your contracts behave when interacting with external protocols, token standards, oracles, and bridges. Assumptions about external contract behaviour that may not hold. The unexpected states that emerge from composability, the attack surface that exists at the boundary between your code and everything else.
