New Smart Contract Monitoring System Launched By Fantom In Collaboration With Debaub

Fantom is among the most rapidly growing Layer 1 blockchain platforms. Recently, it launched Watchdog, a continuous smart auditing system. Decentralized applications built on Fantom will therefore reportedly benefit from automatic audits by the Watchdog system, thanks to a collaboration with leading blockchain security firm Debaub.

The release of Watchdog will not only improve the security of dApps on Fantom, but it will additionally improve the overall quality as well as performance of apps native to Fantom.

Why does this matter?

Security flaws in smart contracts are becoming increasingly common. According to FBI research, approximately $1.3 billion in crypto was stolen in the first quarter of 2022, with 97% of the theft occurring within the DeFi ecosystem. While third party smart contract auditing firms are essential for projects to discover these vulnerabilities, a combination of factors, such as high costs and lengthy wait times, frequently discourage startups and emerging projects from conducting an audit.

With that in mind, Watchdog will provide a powerful automated tool which continuously monitors smart contracts to offer projects with an alternative auditing system that is reliable, affordable, and most importantly consistent.

With Watchdog, Fantom is hence striving to bring a new level of security and protection to the ecosystem, said Michael Kong, CEO of Fantom Foundation. He further indicated that developers need access to smart contract auditing tools that are affordable, efficient, and trustworthy. Watchdog does exactly that, he added, and it will thus set a new security standard going forward.

What comes next?

Using automated, continuous auditing systems like Watchdog to supplement costly third party audits allows projects to effortlessly analyze selected smart contracts. In addition, any issues with dApps analyzed on the Fantom Network are investigated by a human auditor.

Moreover, the Watchdog auditing system will reportedly provide various benefits such as round the clock analysis for more than 80 different types of exploits, periodic updates as well as improvements with new attack vectors which correspond to the gradual emergence of new research, versatile updates with the latest network data and smart contracts of selected projects, professional examination for warnings at a larger scale, addressing specific issues far more effectively, and immediately contacting the relevant project team as soon as a vulnerability has been discovered.

As the crypto and blockchain industry continues to grow, we can expect more security measures to be steadily deployed over many fields in DeFi such as smart contracts, NFTs, the metaverse, and blockchain itself.