There are many smart contract auditing companies and services in the industry that can provide the best solutions based on your audit requirements. However, choosing the right company for auditing your protocol and codebases can be challenging.
We have thoroughly reviewed, evaluated, and analysed tens of smart contract security companies to help you find the best ones to secure your smart contracts and users.
Smart contracts are known for their efficiency and reliability, they have the delicate duty of transferring, storing, and keeping track of sometimes huge amounts of digital value. This requires strong security measures to prevent exploits and ensure user safety.
According to the Crypto Crime Report by Chainalysis, crypto-related crimes reached an all-time high in 2022, involving $20.6 billion in blockchain transactions. Decrypt said that in 2023 alone the total amount of Total Value Locked stolen in DeFi was higher than $1Billion.
This is why we have smart contract audits, smart contract auditors and smart contract auditing companies.
In this article you’ll take a deep dive into the top 10 smart contract auditing companies and learn what sets each of them apart.
Before diving, let’s briefly refresh what a smart contract auditing is, and what Smart contract auditing companies actually do.
A smart contract audit is a time-boxed security-based code review on your smart contract / Web3 system. An auditor’s goal is to find as many vulnerabilities as possible and educate the client on ways to improve the security of their codebase moving forward.
A Smart Contract Audit involves line-by-line analysis, stressing, testing, and understanding of smart contracts or codebases through manual reviews and automated tests. This to ensure best practices are followed and the security and reliability of a smart contract or code base is verified to reduce the risk of exploits and loss of funds.
There are different types of audits, raging from Competitive audits, where 1000s of security researchers compete to find exploit vectors in a code base, to Private audits, where a selected team of top-notch security researchers works hand in hand with a protocol’s team to ensure their smart contracts and users are secured.
In this list of top Smart contract auditing companies, you’ll find both the best competitive auditing platforms, and smart contract audit companies this year - let’s explore the differences.
Smart contract auditing companies are firms that specialise in ensuring the security of smart contracts. They thoroughly analyse and stress test the code in your smart contract to identify any potential bugs, exploit vectors, or unintended behavior.
Their goal is to find and address vulnerabilities to ensure the integrity and reliability of your contract.
A professional audit companies can and will give you all the guidance you need to move forward on your security journey so you can feel confident deploying.
You can learn more about what is a smart contract audit here.
Perfect for:
Competitive smart contract auditing competitions involve 1000s independent auditors examining the security and reliability of a smart contract simultaneously.
Competitive auditing fosters a healthy environment by providing opportunities for auditors to showcase their skills.
These competitions involve different roles such as auditors who protect the ecosystem by identifying threats, judges who assess the severity and validity of findings and evaluate auditors' performance, and projects that sponsor prize pools to incentivise auditors to audit their projects.
Auditors compete to identify vulnerabilities and inefficiencies, aiming to deliver a comprehensive report.
This method ensures multiple perspectives on contract security and promotes a higher level of scrutiny, leading to a robust and secure code base.
Perfect for:
Reaching out to a smart contract auditing company or putting your protocol through a smart contract auditing service can provide several benefits:
This assumes you’ll be working with a good smart contract auditing companies - let’s see how to evaluate “good”.
As we’ve said, choosing the right smart contract auditing company for your protocol, smart contracts, or code base can be far from easy. You need to take into consideration a lot of factors when it comes to trusting someone to secure the code that will potentially hold and or handle all the funds of your users, company, or service.
In this guide we took into consideration 5 factors:
With this in mind, let’s take a look at the top 10 smart contract auditing companies this year.
TrailOfBits has been contributing to Web3 Security since 2012. Their commitment is to address the most complex security challenges by designing and innovating new technologies, as well as conducting thorough research and evaluation of the latest technological products to ensure their security worth.
Smart Contract Audit Services
Technical Expertise
Ethereum, Algorand, Cairo/Starknet, Cosmos, Solana, Substrate/Polkadot.
Trusted Clients
Aave, Acala, Algorand, Arbitrum, Balancer, Bitcoin SV, Chainlink, Compound, Curve, Frax, Liquity, MakerDao, Optimism, Parity, Polygon, Solana, Starknet, and Yearn.
Trusted by leading protocols like SudoSwap LinkPool Oku and Beanstalk, we put together the attention of a community of thousands of top-notch auditors, and the expertise of a team of world wide recognised security researchers
It aims to reduce the amount stolen from DeFi 1% every year and offers a one-stop shop for making Web3 more secure, reliable, and accessible.
Smart Contract Audit Services
Cyfrin is committed to providing 3 main services:
Private Smart Contract Audits, where the team carefully go through each line of code to ensure it is secure and reliable.
Codehawks, a gamified competitive auditing platform where the world’s best auditors compete with each other and win prizes.
Cyfrin Updraft, which is aimed at educating more and more people about Web3 Security, has over 5 million views on YouTube.
Technical Expertise
Cyfrin delivers Solidity, Vyper, and EVM-based Security and supports tools like Foundry, Hardhat, Brownie, Apeworx and Truffle.
Trusted Clients
Cyfrin's Team conducted audits for LinkPool, Sudoswap, Uniswap, HyperLiquid, DropClaim, Beanstalk Wells, Stake.link, and Woosh Deposit Vault.
Spearbit is a decentralized network of security experts that offers Web3 security consulting services. They bridge the gap between independent security experts and Web3 projects that require their services. Auditors have to go through a screening process to become a part of Spearbit and get assigned the appropriate designation.
Smart Contract Audit Services
Speabit offers reviews and other security-related services to Web3 projects with the goal of creating a stronger ecosystem and enables expert freelance auditors seeking flexibility to work on interesting projects together and provide educational content for Web3 security enthusiasts.
Technical Expertise
Spearbit's technology stack, including but not limited to protocol design, smart contracts and solidity compiler, as well as tools such as Foundry Tests, Fuzzing campaigns, and formal verification.
Trusted Clients
Redacted, Primitive, Alchemy, NFTX, Liquid Collective, Astaria, BadgerDAO, Flood, Element, Opensea, Nouns DAO, Morpho, Llame, Kiln, Polygon zkEVM, Goldfinch and many more.
Openzeppelin is a cybersecurity technology and services company known for developing its Solidity libraries. It was the first cybersecurity company to introduce gamification to identify security vulnerabilities in smart contracts. Since 2015, the company has helped protect assets worth over $10 Billion in some of the most prominent organizations in the crypto sector.
Smart Contract Audit Services
Openzeppelin is the standard for secure blockchain applications. They provide multiple services, including:
Technical Expertise
Openzeppelin has expertise across the whole stack: from languages to smart contract systems, protocols, and applications. Their portfolio spans distributed payment networks, financial structures, and governance systems.
Smart Contract Trusted Clients
Openzeppelin is trusted by Ethereum, Compound, Polkadot, Bancor, Coinbase, Celo, 1inch, Optimism, The Graph, and many more.
Smart Contract Auditing is one of the services provided by Consensys. They have protected 100+ blockchain companies with the help of manual auditing and detailed analytics reports.
Smart Contract Audit Services
Consensys Diligence offers a range of products and services to help teams launch their blockchain applications with confidence. These include:
Technical Expertise
Consensys Diligence primarily uses its in-house tools such as fuzzing and CLI to audit EVM-compatible smart contracts and protocols. Along with manual testing, penetrating testing, and code reviews.
Trusted Clients
Lybra Finance, Wallet Guard, MetaMask, Geode Liquid Staking, Filecoin, Socket, Rocket Pool Atlas, Forta, 1inch Exchange, Fuji Protocol, Gamma, PoolTogether, Rocketpool, DeFi Saver, DAOfi and more.
Sigma Prime specialise in information security, blockchain, and system design. Their team provides the expertise required to operate securely and efficiently in high-risk, dynamic and emerging environments. Sigma Prime also founded and maintains Lighthouse, an open-source implementation of the Ethereum 2.0 specification written in Rust.
Smart Contract Audit Services
Technical Expertise
Sigma Prime primarily works on making Ethereum more secure and aims to work on its core protocol development with an active interest in formal verification techniques, zero-knowledge cryptography and advanced assessment tools.
Trusted Clients
Trusted by Aave, AdEx, AlphaWallet, Arbitrum, Aurora, Avalanche, Chainlink, Dapper, Ethereum, Filecoin, Gearbox, Infinigold, Near, Optimism, Pollkadot, Sushiswap, Synthetix and Protocol Labs.
ChainSecurity provides end-to-end security solutions for blockchain protocols and smart contracts. They've created two impressive tools — Securify and VerX — for detecting and fixing security issues in smart contracts, ensuring the security and integrity of decentralized projects.
Smart Contract Audit Services
Technical Expertise
ChainSecurity solely aims to focus on Ethereum and Polkadot-based smart contract auditing.
Trusted Clients
ChainSecurity is trusted by MakerDAO, Lido, Curve, Aave, Compound, Uniswap, Yearn.Finance, Bancor, 1inch, xDai, Rarible, Polkadot, Paxos, Enzyme and Circle.
Dedaub provides end-to-end security solutions to the world’s leading web3 protocols and completed 100+ full-protocol audits and $1.5 Billion funds rescued in white-hat hacks. They leverage powerful analysis, advanced AI and analytics and human expertise to audit the smart contracts.
Smart Contract Audit Services
Technical Expertise
Dedaub provides support for both Ethereum and Binance Chain.
Trusted Clients
Chainlink, Ethereum, DeFi Saver, Lido, Ledger, Yearn, Perpetual Protocol, Fantom, Liquity, GMX, Blur, Coinbase.
CodeArena is a platform that offers competitive and solo audits to secure projects. Wardens identify vulnerabilities, Judges evaluate the findings, Projects create prize pools, and Lookouts review submissions.
Smart Contract Audit Services
CodeArena offers several types of smart contract security auditing services, each with a specific purpose:
Technical Expertise
CodeArena is an audit platform that enables auditors to participate in code audits and submit reports. It supports multiple chains and tools.
Trusted Clients
Chainlink, Delegate, ElasticDAO, NFTX, Yield, PoolTogether, Covalent, Ambire, Mochi, BadgerDAO, Slingshot, yAxis and many more.
CodeHawks is a competitive auditing platform that focuses on helping companies secure their smart contracts and ensuring that auditors get paid for their services.
It is powered by Cyfrin, a leading Web3 security company and has distributed more than $350,000 on its platform.
Audit Services
Technical Expertise
CodeHawks operates as a versatile audit platform that invites a wide array of auditors skilled in multiple programming languages and blockchain networks.
Trusted Clients
Sparkn, Beedle, DittoETH, Vyper
Recognising the significance of top smart contract audit companies is crucial in ensuring the safety your projects and protocols. These audits are essential for identifying and resolving vulnerabilities in the code, saving both money and reputation.
With the emergence of more DeFi projects and applications, compromising on security is not an option. Therefore, it is not only advisable but also necessary to have experts conduct a thorough smart contract audit.
