ZK Labs Community Audits Initiative for non-ICO Projects

As part of a broader pursuit to securing the ecosystem, we at ZK Labs are excited to announce our Community Audits initiative to sponsor audits for projects that have not done ICO and don’t plan to do one.

Examples of eligible projects include tooling and libraries important to the development ecosystem (e.g., web3js, solc), non-profit smart contract infrastructure (e.g. ENS, Multisig wallets), open source crypto code/libraries (e.g., ZoKrates), or services beneficial to community.

Note that the project doesn’t necessarily need to be non-profit to qualify, as long as it can serve as a utility to the community — for example, gambling contracts will never be eligible, but a state channel platform that has some fee system built in could be fine. The point of the community audits initiative is for grassroots projects to be able to receive quality audits without needing to think about raising large amounts of funding before the project can go live, and without having to go through a complex ECF-type application process for a grant.

First Wave of Community Audits

As part of this announcement, we‘re thrilled to publish the first two community audits we’ve undertaken:

SolidStamp: SolidStamp connects smart contract users and auditors to ensure the safety of their funds. The contract maintains an on-chain database of smart contract audits so you can be confident in the code you interact with on-chain.

— The audit by Matthew Di Ferrante can be found here: https://zklabs.io/audits/solidstamp.html

Token Subscription: The Token Subscription project enables applications to create a trustless subscription model without their users needing to constantly and manually transfer tokens.

— The audit by Dean Eigenmann can be found here: https://zklabs.io/audits/tokensub.html

About the Initiative

So far, the following auditors are confirmed as being part of the initiative:

• Matthew Di Ferrante, ZK Labs Founder & Ethereum Security Contributor
• Dean Eigenmann, ZK Labs Auditor & ENS Developer
• Nick Johnson, ENS Project Lead & Ethereum Core Dev

I personally will commit to doing at least one reasonably sized community audit per month, along with Dean Eigenmann. We hope to grow the pool with more volunteers as time goes on.

For any audits that would take a much longer amount of time, we will also be maintaining a charity multisig whose purpose is to fund more complex undertakings. A percentage of profits from ZK Labs will go to fund the initiative, and donations to it are welcomed by anyone. When donating you can also nominate a project or specify a project class (e.g, crypto code, tooling, etc) that you would like your audit donation to go towards.

If you have a project you want audited that you feel meets the eligibility criteria, want to be involved or are willing to be a multisig curator, reach out to us at audits@zklabs.io or come talk to us in our public room on riot: https://riot.im/app/#/room/#zklabs:matrix.org

I hate paperwork just as much as the next cryptoanarchist, so I promise the process will be simple and decisions quick — don’t be afraid to email, even if we may not be able to do a full audit I’m always happy to provide advice.