A Polkadot smart contract audit is a security review of code deployed to Polkadot, carried out against the Substrate FRAME runtime execution model and written in Rust (Substrate / ink!) — covering both the bug classes shared across Substrate / Polkadot systems and the failure modes specific to Polkadot.
On Substrate, the runtime is the protocol, and weight is security. An extrinsic whose declared weight is below its real cost is a denial-of-service vector against the whole parachain.
Substrate audits concentrate on the runtime: origin checks on every extrinsic, benchmarked weights that reflect worst-case execution, storage that cannot grow without bound, and migrations that complete inside a block. Getting any of these wrong affects the chain rather than one application.
We review pallet logic and origins, weight and benchmarking correctness, storage growth, XCM configuration and runtime upgrade migrations, plus ink! contracts where the chain hosts them.
Polkadot runs on Substrate FRAME runtime, so it inherits the bug classes below from every system in that family.
Polkadot contracts are written in Rust (Substrate / ink!). See our Rust audit methodology.
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.
Pallet logic and origin checks, benchmarked weights, unbounded storage growth, XCM configuration and runtime migrations — the areas where a bug affects the chain rather than one application.
Because weight is what prices block space. An extrinsic that costs more to execute than it declares lets an attacker exhaust block capacity cheaply, which is a denial of service on the whole parachain.
Yes, alongside the runtime where relevant — the contract surface and the runtime surface have different failure modes.
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.