Why Auditing Smart Contracts Is Important
Smart contracts are lines of code living in the realm of the blockchain. Once deployed, they cannot be changed and they make financial transactions for you or your users. Bugs and flaws can have catastrophic consequences. In this article, you will find out what audits are and why they are vital to your project.
What are Smart contracts?
As mentioned earlier, smart contracts are lines of code, small programs that are deployed on the blockchain and that allow users to interact with them. They can be very basic, like most tokens created on the Binance Smart Chain for example. They have a function to mint or create tokens, a function to get the balance of a certain address and a function allowing to transfer tokens from one address to the next. For these basic smart contracts, there exists numerous templates that have been thoroughly tested and you can use those templates to create your own token in few minutes. You will find many videos on YouTube showing you exactly how to do it for free in 15 minutes or less, such as this excellent video by Ivan on Tech.
On the other hand, some smart contracts are much more complicate. They can be AMMs (Automated market makers) allowing users to trade tokens between themselves and to add or remove liquidity. They can even include complex DeFi (Decentralized Finance) features such as staking or farming. More recently, NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) have been able to do even more intricate and complex operations and they can contain tens of thousands of lines of code.
Like any program or software, there can be bugs or errors in the code. And since we’re talking about money, it’s imperative that these programs be virtually error-free. It’s where audits come in.
Auditing your smart contract
Auditing your smart contract comes after you have rigorously tested your program and made sure everything works as intended. Still, having an external audit allows a third party to have a deep look at your code to find bugs or errors that you may have overlooked. It also reassures your users that the code is legit and secure. There are many auditing companies specialized in Blockchain smart contracts. They usually charge depending on the complexity of your code. A simple token can be audited for as low as 1200$ and more complex smart contracts can cost tens of thousands to audit.
After submitting your code, the audit company will thoroughly investigate and send a report with all the bugs and errors found, together with suggestions to fix the bugs and to improve the code in general. You will be able to modify the code, but as we mentioned earlier, once deployed you cannot modify the code, so the new code will need to be deployed as a new smart contract and reaudited. Depending on your agreement with the audit company, there may be additional charge to recheck the updated code. You can then publish the audit so your users know they can trust your code.
For small projects that are not so critical or who don’t have enough funds to hire an auditing company, there exists free AI automated audits, such as thsoe provided by MarketMove. Since they are free and automatic, you can even request an audit for any smart contract you wish to use. This way for example, you can check Taal Coin (TAAL) smart contract audit with its 97% Overall score.
