As blockchain technology advances daily, smart contracts are gaining more recognition. Blockchain technology provides a wide spectrum of applications and transaction use cases to serve practically every economic sector. As a result, the adoption of smart contracts is applicable in all aspects of modern life, including finance, the internet of things (IoT), supply chains, and the entertainment industry.
Considering the openness with which smart contracts are structured, all blockchain users can see how they function. However, there may be instances where security breaches also come to light, which hackers or other cybercriminals might use to victimize a company's smart contract drastically. Ultimately, these assaults may cause revenue losses, consumer data disclosure, and other risks.
Hence, it is crucial to comprehend the smart contract audit cost and components to counter cybercrime and phishing attacks. So, let's get started.
Why is Smart Contract Audit Necessary?
In the cryptosphere, breaching smart contracts is a persistent problem, and the origins of these concerns may be broken down into two categories: technical code flaws and human blunders. So here is where thorough, smart contract audit services might come in handy.
Smart contract auditing is an approach that examines a set of codes to detect major flaws, failures, and associated risks. Since the code is no longer prone to revision after being uploaded and operated on the core network, an audit is usually performed before that.
Due to the inevitable nature of the smart contract, businesses are curious and paying extra attention to deploying their smart contract swiftly. As a result, smart contract auditing implementation is prescribed for every blockchain project.
Let's take a look at why a smart contract audit is necessary for firms to have a positive experience with smart contracts:
Avoid revenue loss
In addition to assisting in the elimination of any errors in the code, auditing code in the initial development production cycle helps you prevent financial loss after implementation.
Minimize security threats
Auditing aids in keeping track of any loophole that smart contract developers inadvertently leave when coding a program.
Better ownership
A smart contract audit examines every factor to assist and mitigate execution, as only the smart contract owner can execute the contract.
Analysis Report
To assist developers in resolving security flaws and other shortcomings in the code, the auditor provides a holistic analysis of smart contracts.
Expert recommendations
The auditors carefully review the code to track any possible security gaps in the smart contract. Additionally, they will facilitate you by highlighting the potential areas and offering insights.
Consistent security evaluation
You may consistently verify your smart contract's soft spots and periodically monitor its security with the auditing procedure. Frequent security evaluations can eventually increase the efficiency of your smart contracts.
See More: Acquire Top-Tier Smart Contract Development Solutions
Types of Smart Contract Auditing
Smart contract auditing techniques vary according to the nature of the projects. Both an automatic and a manual technique may be used to audit smart contracts, as will be covered below:
Manual Smart Contract Audit
Smart contract audits benefit greatly from automated analysis tools. They can make it easier to identify typical smart contract shortcomings rapidly. But on the other hand, they lack comprehension of developers' underlying motives for creating smart contracts and could occasionally return false positives. As a result, manual inspection is a crucial prerequisite for enhancing the discovery of security flaws in smart contract code.
To verify that a project performs per the anticipated functions, an auditing team with extensive experience assesses the specifications. The smart contract project team can get credible suggestions for improvements from the smart contract auditors based on their thorough observations.
At Cubix, we already have several veteran auditors and engineers who inspect the code separately before comparing their findings to reduce the likelihood of missing bugs.
Automated Smart Contract Audit
In recent years, a sharp spike in demand for robust smart contract codes has massively raised the need for automatic flaw detection software.
The automated tools can assess a program to identify the parameters that cause each program component to run, making it easier to spot common coding errors — automated analysis tools in smart contract auditing aid in expediting the audit process.
The automated analysis ensures faster response time, enabling freedom from reliance on human auditors.
Read More: What are Web3 Contracts? Exploring Smart Contracts
Cost of Each Step of Smart Contract Audit
Let us elaborate and estimate the average cost for each smart contract audit step:
Collection of Code Design
It aids in figuring out the audit's extent, the desired business practice, the project's overall design, and its objective. Documents like the functional business specification, technical fact sheet, whitepaper or yellow paper for the project, smart contract code via GitHub contributions, and others must be exposed to auditors.
Estimated cost: $1100 - $1400
Unit Testing
After compiling the code design model, the developer prepares unit test cases. While running unit tests, the auditor verifies to see if the smart contract operates as intended. At this point, smart contract auditors employ testnet and auditing tools to ensure unit testing tackles all relevant risks.
Estimated cost: $900 - $1000
Auditing Approach
Auditors usually analyze smart contracts manually to be more productive than an automated audit. Attempts like front-running can be easily spotted using this strategy.
Estimated cost: $1500 - $2000
Initial Draft
After manual and automated audits, the auditors compile code bugs uncovered during auditing and propose them to development teams to be fixed.
Estimated cost: $1300 - $1500
Read More: Best Practices for Developing Secure Ethereum Smart Contracts
Final Audit Publishing
After smart contract developers have rectified the vulnerabilities, the auditor produces a final document that lists all the concerns and the steps taken to address each one. The final report is published by professionals on GitHub and may be reviewed by anyone.
Estimated cost: $1000 - $1100
Assessments of Audit
After conducting all of this rigorous analysis, auditors will evaluate the thorough audit report that includes remarks and recommendations for the user. Along with the audit team's feedback, the audit assessment aids the stakeholders in analyzing the problems and smart contract uncertainties.
Estimated cost: $1200 - $1300
Total Cost of Smart Contract Audit
The number of smart contracts that need to be audited will determine how much a smart contract audit costs. Depending on the complexity of the code, smart contract auditing companies often charge between $5,000 to $15,000; however, in some circumstances, the cost may be significantly higher.
To understand how contract intricacies reflect current security trends, experts also examine them. The auditing company, therefore, creates a report detailing the code's possible faults and offers better proposals to beef up security.
One of the reasons the smart contract auditing process costs so much is that the smart contract auditor needs to scrutinize the code line by line, which is a labor-intensive and complex operation. In addition, the cost of the audit depends on the audit firm conducting it and its credibility.
Read More: DApps vs. Smart Contracts: All You Need to Know
Ready to Create Your Smart Contract?
The immense popularity of smart contract audit services is for a reason. Finding contract flaws and glitches is a necessary phase that almost every DeFi product developer ought to do. Developers, ICO company owners, DeFi development firms, and stakeholders of decentralized applications may all benefit from smart-contract audits. Doing this created a protective shield for you and your users, preventing the possibility of losing their money.
Blockchain development is one of Cubix's prime areas of competence as a software development firm. Cubix' team of blockchain professionals has developed DeFi products, lending and borrowing forums, NFT platforms, cryptocurrency exchanges, digital wallets, and several other products. Moreover, we create smart contracts and offer high-quality smart contract audit services since we have a wide portfolio of successful blockchain projects.
Get in touch with us to learn more about the process and cost of smart contract audit and take your business to the next level of success!
