Blockchain Protocol Audit — A blockchain protocol audit reviews the chain itself rather than the applications on it — consensus rules, state transition validity, validator incentives, fee and gas accounting, upgrade governance and bridging assumptions — to find the conditions under which the network can be halted, forked or made to accept invalid state.
Protocol bugs are rarer than contract bugs and considerably worse: they can halt a chain, allow invalid state, or let a minority of validators extract value from everyone. They also tend to live in the seams — between the consensus layer and the execution layer, between the fee model and the mempool, between the upgrade mechanism and the validator set.
We review the specification against the implementation, then attack the assumptions: what a validator with 10% stake can do, what happens when a message is delayed rather than dropped, whether the fee market can be starved, and whether an upgrade can be pushed faster than the network can react.
We fix a commit hash, agree the in-scope contracts and read your architecture docs, then build a threat model: who the actors are, what the trust boundaries are, and which invariants must never break. Nothing is reviewed against assumptions we have not written down.
Line-by-line review by at least two auditors working independently, focused on authorisation, accounting, upgrade paths, external integrations and the gap between what the code does and what the documentation claims it does. Most critical findings come from this phase, not from tooling.
Static analysers appropriate to the language, plus property-based fuzzing and invariant testing to push the system into states no unit test covers. Tooling is used to widen coverage, never to replace the manual pass.
Candidate findings are proven on a forked network with a working proof of concept. We report what an attacker can actually do and what it costs them, not a theoretical severity label.
Every finding gets a severity rating, reproduction steps, the affected code, the impact in concrete terms and a specific remediation. You get a draft for discussion before anything is finalised.
We re-test every remediation against the original proof of concept and check that the fix has not opened a new path. The final report is yours to publish.
| Severity | What it means |
|---|---|
| Critical | Direct loss of funds or permanent freezing of assets, exploitable by any actor. |
| High | Loss of funds or protocol insolvency under realistic conditions, or requiring a privileged actor to misbehave. |
| Medium | Broken protocol behaviour, denial of service, or value leakage that does not directly drain the contract. |
| Low | Edge-case incorrectness with limited impact, or an issue requiring implausible preconditions. |
| Informational | Code quality, gas efficiency, documentation mismatch and defence-in-depth suggestions. |
Single token contract: starts from $999, report in 24–48 hours. dApp, GameFi or RWA project: starts from $2,999. DeFi protocol, L2 / rollup, Bridge, ZK circuit, AI agent / MCP: scoped per project after we have seen the code.
Yes. We review your customisations and, critically, the assumptions the framework makes that your changes may have invalidated — module permissions, execution determinism, and the parameters you chose.
Both, and the gap between them. Divergence between spec and implementation is where consensus bugs live, and where two clients on the same network stop agreeing.
We assess it explicitly: what the sequencer can censor or reorder, whether the forced-inclusion escape hatch actually works under congestion, and what a user can recover if the sequencer stops permanently.
Longer than a contract audit — typically several weeks, because the review includes the specification, the implementation and adversarial simulation. We scope it after reading the architecture.
A repository or contract address, a commit hash to freeze the scope, whatever architecture or spec documentation exists, and a point of contact who can answer design questions. If documentation is thin we will write our understanding of the system back to you and ask you to confirm it — that step alone catches design-level bugs.
A single token contract is 24–48 hours. A typical dApp or mid-sized protocol runs one to two weeks. Large DeFi systems, L2s, bridges and ZK circuits are scoped per project after we have seen the code. We will give you a fixed timeline with the quote, not an estimate that moves.
Yes. Fix review is part of the engagement, not an upsell. We re-run the original proof of concept against your patched code and confirm the fix has not introduced a new path.
Send the repository and a commit hash through the contact form, message @bugtester25 on Telegram, or book a 30-minute scoping call. 200+ protocols audited · $4B+ secured · 0 hacks post-audit. Prefer email? info@safeedges.in.