Delegate Mission Request: smart contract auditing services

[opjulian]

Delegate Mission Request: smart contract auditing services

Delegate Mission Request Summary:
This is a continuation of the RFG-3 from last season: gather smart contract auditors to provide subsidized audits for promising projects determined by the grant council.

S5 Intent 1 Intent 3

Proposing Delegate: Jack Anorak

Proposal Tier 1: Fledgling Tier and up

Baseline grant amount: 250k OP

Should this Foundation Mission be fulfilled by one or multiple applicants: Multiple

Completion date: Aug 1, 2024

Apply Here

Specification

How will this Delegate Mission Request help accomplish the above Intent?

A major thesis I’ve held is that reducing overall costs of deployment will be a powerful draw for builders. Audits are often the single costliest part of deploying contracts, both in terms of money and in terms of time. Launch fees can easily run upward of $100k, and if a project doesn’t have the startup capital to fund this work, it will often turn to other sources of financing, such as soliciting VC or launching a token where otherwise unnecessary—or, worse, cut corners and deploy with a less experienced or reputable set of auditors.

This is highly relevant to us as an ecosystem: getting these fees subsidized can often make the difference between a deployment and no deployment—or between a safe deployment and one whose exploit has widely felt consequences. If we believe in the long-term growth that can be harnessed by network effects and cultivating an open building scene, this becomes a clear investment focus to ensure the future we want to see. And this has direct results for users, who need some reasonable assurances of security when using economically live products.

Meanwhile, grants issued by the Grant Council face certain limitations: specifically, builder grants are locked up for over a year, which can be suboptimal for projects that need liquidity on high-ticket costs like this today. However, an in-kind grant can help to get auditing work done—the thing many of these projects need—as early as possible while avoiding any risks associated with distributing the OP token.

What is required to execute this Delegate Mission Request?

To execute this Mission Request, we need:

• A pool of reputable and experienced auditors.
• A system for matching auditors with projects that require their services.
• A mechanism for distributing the locked grants to the auditors and ensuring they are used as intended.
• The exact structure of these kinds of grants is somewhat flexible and dependent on what sorts of proposals will come our way.

One structure that worked for RFGs: auditing firms and collectives propose to be labeled ‘Optimism preferred auditors’, preserving space for some number of grantee projects (or audit hours) at a certain payment schedule. They may also bid on providing additional capacity for projects that would themselves pay some sort of rate.

How should the Token House measure progress towards this Mission?

• Auditors enlisted in the program
• Projects matched with auditors
• Audits completed
• Projects successfully deployed following an audit

How should badgeholders measure impact upon completion of this Mission?

• % decrease in number of security incidents relative to some established baseline
• % decrease in overall deployment costs for builders
• number of onboarded builders for whom auditing would have been a make-or-break obstacle
• % audit coverage on OP Mainnet