High-tier smart contract audit companies often provide additional audit services and solutions for continuous monitoring, pentesting, and incident response assistance. On the other hand, low-quality platforms may be incompetent, unprofessional, and not experienced enough to detect critical vulnerabilities and complex issues. That’s why knowing the quality and professional expertise of the best smart contract auditors is vital for judging the safety of the target project. Therefore, before picking a suitable candidate for auditing your projects, always do your due diligence and research to ensure the quality.
Top Smart Contract Auditors 2023: Ranked
We have ranked the blockchain audit companies below based on multiple factors, including auditing history, provided services, and security team professionalism. Generally, all smart contract auditors can be divided into three main groups:
- Industry Leaders – Best Crypto Audit Companies
- Recommended Auditing Firms
- Acceptable Auditing Firms
Let’s review each group of these best smart contract auditors in detail.
#1 Industry Leaders
Audit companies falling into the category of industry leaders are mostly the golden standard for competence, diligence, and thoroughness. However, the security audit prices of these crypto auditing companies are relatively high and can be suitable only for significant enterprises.
Hacken
The category of our ranked industry leaders can confidently open the Ukrainian auditing and blockchain security firm Hacken. It’s one of the famous names among high-tier smart contract auditors due to its quality services and security solutions. Some core services offered by the best smart contract auditors include:
- Blockchain Security Evaluation
- Mobile and Web Penetration Testing
- Smart Contract Auditing
- Crypto Exchange Ratings
- Bug Bounty Program Coordination
The Hacken team has performed over 900 audits for various blockchain protocols and DeFi projects of any complexity level. These include anything from cryptos and launchpads to decentralized exchanges and security network platforms.
During its professional journey, Hacken managed to gain the trust and support of many major crypto exchanges and blockchain platforms such as KuCoin, Huobi, etc. More importantly, it also has an extensive list of reputable connections and partners, which add an extra level of reliability to Hacken’s provided audit services, for example, Avalanche audit services. Some significant partners include Coingecko, Avalanche, Ethereum Foundation, and CoinMarketCap.
ConsenSys Diligence
ConsenSys is one of the giants of the cyber security industry with the quality level of providing the best smart contract services. Its primary focus is on the Ethereum blockchain, and most of the technologies and resources are dedicated to creating and developing Ethereum applications and software, specifically financial ecosystems.
In the smart contract auditing circles, ConsenSys Diligence is famous for the variety of its open-source and closed-source products, including MythX, which is one of the most powerful automated vulnerability scanners to date. Furthermore, MythX provides a robust API designed for cyber security professionals and smart contract auditors to access blockchain security analysis tools and resources.
Some of the well-known protocols audited by the security team of ConsenSys Diligence include Bancor, FEI, PoolTogether, Aave, ENS, Balancer, and more.
Trail of Bits
Another leading figure in the world of smart contracts and blockchain security audits is Trail of Bits. This one of the best blockchain audit company offers software security consulting and tools for blockchain application development and smart contract audits. Additionally, the Trail Of Bits team of security experts provides organizations and businesses with high-level cryptography and overall infrastructure protection.
Trail of Bits also conducts a massive amount of open source work. Lately, their team of security experts has discovered critical vulnerabilities in widely used open-source encryption libraries.
Runtime Verification
Our list of best smart contract security audit companies will be incomplete without Runtime Verification. It’s a solid, smart contract audit and blockchain audit firm with a core focus on formal verification, which has become a distinguishing feature and welcoming card of Runtime’s security team.
The smart contracts audit company provides high-quality and comprehensive auditing results by mathematically validating that a written code meets all predetermined requirements and the original set of determining standards.
Runtime Verification has a long list of prominent partners and connections; some of the notable names include Tezos, Algorand, OlymusDAO, Beacon Chain, Gnosis, Maker, and others.
#2 Recommended Smart Contract Audit Companies
These are smart contracts security firms with high-quality services lacking only the proven history of top-level security providers. It’s a good choice for enterprises looking for solid security testing but can’t allow themselves to pay expensive service prices set by Industry Leader blockchain audit companies.
Halborn
It’s a full-service security corporation providing blockchain security, smart contract audits, and blockchain security consultation. Halborn has a proven experience of professional activity in securing projects’ contracts and entire infrastructures. What’s more, the blockchain security company performs contract audits for alternative blockchain networks, including Solana, Algorand, Cosmos, NEAR, Tezos, and of course, Ethereum smart contracts.
Moreover, their publicly available audit reports are of high quality, and there are no found exploits of Halborn audited projects and protocols. Halborn also has a blog with a series of different articles and news releases covering specific incident post-mortems, general protection and security, and details of Halborn discoveries and findings such as the 0-day bug in Cosmos Smart Contracts.
Dedaub
It is a crypto security audit company that also provides ongoing security monitoring and revising. Dedaub’s security professionals and auditors team has conducted smart contract audits for major, solid entities such as the Ethereum Foundation, Chainlink, Lido, and Immunify. Moreover, they are one of the active participants in the on-chain security ecosystem, identifying and mitigating several extremely critical bugs and security vulnerabilities in the wild.
Dedaub also has a notable blog that contains detailed breakdowns of their most significant findings, such as the Billion Dollar No-Op. You can also fund some of their audit reports which are publicly available and have good quality.
Paladin
Another organization fitting the category of recommended blockchain auditing companies is Paladin specializes in smaller protocol audits. Micro-cap companies and projects carry a considerable risk of security exploits and data breaches. The reasons for this can be different, including the lack of technical knowledge or malicious teams. Smaller projects can also experience compromised admin credentials, governance attacks, exploits, etc., none of which smart contract auditor cover.
During this time, two known projects were audited by the Paladin team that were exploited. One is the famous VultureSwap which lost almost $500k after the developers failed to properly implement necessary fixes to the vulnerabilities. Another one is a protocol that performed modifications after the Paladin audit, resulting in errors leading to the security exploit.
ChainSecurity
ChainSecurity is a Switzerland-based blockchain security provider that has extensively worked with Curve, Maker, and others. During the professional journey of the ChainSecurity team, no significant exploits took place.
Like other cybersecurity firms, this auditing company provides smart contract auditing and blockchain security consulting to businesses of any kind and size. It has a rich track and a history of working with several major protocols and handling projects with a value of billions of UDS.
#3 Acceptable Crypto Audit Companies
Organizations that are generally acceptable but lack in many different ways and have various issues can be classified into this group. For example, they may have black spots on their track history, witnessed security incidents during their expertise, or just do unexceptional work.
Omnisicia
Omnisicia is a relatively new smart contract audit company with over 80 performed smart contract audits in its professional biography. However, crypto audit company focuses mainly on younger blockchain protocols, counting Rari, OlymusDAO, Tokemank, and KlimaDAO.
What’s notable about Omnisicia is that all audit reports are publicly available, so other experts or clients can easily access information about past performance and crucial findings. Moreover, Omnisicia Twitter is one of the active accounts among others, which along with standard blockchain security company updates, covers educational content and resources as well.
Quantstamp
One of the well-known blockchain security providers with a huge pile of projects and protocols under its belt is indeed Quantstamp. Its security team has performed smart contract audits of high complexity and high profile projects, including the Binance, Solana, and Cordano blockchain networks.
So why is Quantstamp only in the third group of our ranking? It’s mainly because several Quantstamp-certified protocols have suffered significant financial losses from high-profile hacking attacks in the past. And though all the security exploits have particularly complicated factors shifting the blame from itself, the reputation of Quantstamp has still been influenced by it.
It just shows that even a high-level security provider like Quantstamp can’t guarantee 100 % protection for your projects and systems. There is still a remaining percentage of risk that can cause considerable damage in case of successful exploits.
Coinspect
Founded in 2014, Coinspect is a blockchain technology security and smart contract auditing firm providing a wide variety of services. These solutions include security consultation, penetration testing, contract audits, and more. And although Coinspect doesn’t have records of big exploits, it still has a way to go in order to become a high-tier auditor. It’s mainly because the security team doesn’t have records of large-sized and complex audits on their account. However, the publicly available audit reports prove their service quality is quite good.
The Bottom Line
Smart contract audits are an essential and indispensable component of overall cybersecurity solutions. Comprehensive security audits from a blockchain audit company help to identify existing bugs and vulnerabilities and ensure the protocol follows all the security regulations. However, no single security firm and audit provider can guarantee its clients absolute and complete protection. There’s always a risk of hacking possibility and security breaches that anyone can encounter at one point in time. That being the case, experienced, crypto auditors employ highly qualified and competent security professionals who can conduct comprehensive and proper assessments and reviews, helping businesses minimize the potential exploitation probability and prepare the system for immediate response action.
There is no single doubt about the importance of smart contract audits. However, we should remember that a smart contract audit process, no matter how comprehensive and proper, can’t completely clean all security mechanisms from various possible vulnerabilities and potential hacking attacks or guarantee a risk-free security system afterward. Attacks and exploits are unpredictable in nature; anything from an unconscious mistake to a minor bug in the written code can lead to irreversible damages in case of successful exploits. And it has nothing much to do with smart contract auditing services.
However, smart contract auditing firms in this industry still play a significant role in protecting the security systems and identifying existing issues and vulnerabilities of target projects. And though they can’t fully secure the project’s smart contracts, networks, or applications, a professional and high-quality audit will ensure a bug-free infrastructure and help you minimize the risks of data leakage and security incidents. But it’s only the case if the security auditing provider has a proven history record and impressive professional background on their track.