While smart contracts are widely considered to be the newest technology to keep an eye on, they are not without their flaws. Indeed, there is a growing demand for auditing of smart contracts. Solidified aims to provide such a service to the cryptocurrency community. Having more platforms focusing on smart contract auditing will elevate the technology to a whole new level.
Solidified Crowdsources Smart Contract Review
There are plenty of people in the world who can look at a smart contract and uncover any flaws that may be present. Some people even specialize in this type of activity, which makes them quite valuable to the overall smart contract ecosystem. Bringing those people together into one unified offering may seem to be a centralized effort, but it is evident Solidified is banking on crowdsourcing more than anything else.
No one can deny there is a growing need for smart contract auditing these days. With mounting numbers of ICOs and token sales, there are a lot of potential flaws which need to be identified before things go awry. No one wants a repeat of what happened to some ICOs which lost millions due to wrong code in their contracts, after all. Auditing services are direly needed, and Solidified is just one of the many contenders in this space right now.
The project focuses on bringing smart contract auditing experts together with the projects and companies that require such services. According to its website, its experts will include blockchain veterans and Solidity programmers. Other interested parties can also apply to get involved, which is pretty interesting. There is a checkbox asking whether or not a given application is “for an ICO”. That is a pretty interesting touch, to say the very least.
As one would expect, Solidified will carry its own certification standard. This scoring system will rate contracts based on how they are designed, the code used, and security practices put in place. Errant smart contracts pose a very real threat to the Ethereum ecosystem, for obvious reasons. Moreover, with smart contract technology coming to various cryptocurrencies in the future, there will be an even bigger demand for proper audits.
Whether or not Solidified can become the auditing platform the world needs remains to be seen. The process is pretty straightforward: developers upload a contract, transfer a bounty over to the Solidified team, and the experts will review the code and identify potential issues. It is then up to the original developer to inspect these notes and make changes accordingly. After a final review, the smart contract will then be “solidified”.
All of this highlights a pretty interesting state of affairs. Audits of smart contracts are direly needed to ensure this technology can be considered legitimate and worthwhile. We can only hope to see more of these solutions pop up in the future, as the industry can’t lean on just one service provider of crowdsourcing efforts. It will be interesting to see how the general public responds to this effort, to say the very least.
