Smart Contract Audit
A professional security review of a protocol's code before (and after) launch — necessary, but never a guarantee.
A smart contract audit is a systematic security review, usually by a specialized firm, examining a protocol’s code for vulnerabilities — reentrancy, logic flaws, oracle manipulation, access-control errors — before it handles real funds. Reputable projects publish their audit reports.
An audit meaningfully reduces risk but never eliminates it: audited protocols have still been exploited, because audits are time-boxed human reviews of complex code, not proofs of correctness. Read audits critically — who performed it, what scope, were findings fixed, is the deployed code the audited code? The presence of a credible audit is a baseline expectation; its absence is a strong warning; and its existence is not a safety guarantee. Diversify and size accordingly.