Built by Debaub, the Watchdog Smart Contract Security Tool Offers Seamless, Affordable Audits
Fantom, one of the fastest growing layer-1 blockchain platforms, announced the deployment of Watchdog, a smart contract security analyzer, on Fantom Mainnet. Through a collaboration with leading blockchain security firm, Debaub, decentralized applications (dApps) developed on the Fantom Mainnet will be automatically audited for vulnerabilities by the Watchdog system. The deployment of Watchdog will enable developers to bolster the security and functionality of decentralized applications on Fantom, provide advanced features, and ultimately improve the experience for Fantom users.
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Smart contract audits are crucial to the security and longevity of the decentralized ecosystem. Despite the necessity of audits, the costs associated with the process are astronomical. The companies that offer smart contract audit services usually charge from $5,000 – $30,000 USD for smaller projects, and can climb as high as $500K depending on the size and complexity of the code. As a result, an increasing number of projects have had to choose whether to opt for a smart contract audit or to devote financial resources to alternative options. To this end, Watchdog provides a powerful tool that continuously monitors smart contracts on the blockchain. Since deploying on Ethereum, Watchdog has saved hundreds of millions of vulnerable funds, and made nine notable public disclosures.
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“Watchdog’s continuous auditing is a powerful new tool for all builders on Fantom,” said Michael Kong, CEO Fantom Foundation. “It is one of the most sophisticated security tools available, finding even the most subtle exploits. This will give developers the confidence to build safe applications on Fantom, with Watchdog monitoring each and every deployment. I am confident Watchdog will help protect many users on Fantom.”
Unlike other tools that exist, Watchdog analyzes the underlying virtual machine instructions by decompiling and then performing static analysis across all of the contract’s functionality. To start, Watchdog will monitor every smart contract with a total value locked (TVL) of at least $10 million on Fantom.
Watchdog monitoring and notification will broadly work as following:
- All contracts that are part of each protocol will be grouped automatically (under human supervision).
- Watchdog will analyze these contracts on average once every several hours, and display warnings of vulnerabilities or proto-vulnerabilities
- The static warnings are combined with queries on environmental conditions to produce reports that can point to security issues
- These reports are sent to the team building the smart contract, and will coordinate with the Watchdog team on solutions to fix any identified issues.