Polkadot’s Safety Boost: Code4rena and PAL Begin Rust Audits for Parachains

• The Polkadot Assurance Legion (PAL) has partnered with Code4rena to sponsor Rust audits for parachains on the Polkadot network to boost security and identify any vulnerabilities.
• The audits will start with three parachains—Phala, Acala and HydraDX—with wardens on Code4rena set to earn $212,000 in cumulative prizes for auditing the three parachains.

Polkadot Assurance Legion (PAL), a collective of some of the network’s most prominent projects meant to advance security in the ecosystem, has partnered with Code4rena, a blockchain audit platform, for the audit of parachains in a push for a more secure network.

The crypto ecosystem has remained a target of hackers for years; last year, cyber criminals made away with $1.7 billion worth of digital assets, one report reveals. Thorough audits are among the best ways to ensure a project doesn’t have any vulnerabilities that these criminals can exploit.

With the partnership, PAL and Code4rena are seeking to make the Polkadot network more secure with Rust audits for select parachains. At Code4rena, security experts participate in a gamified quest to unearth all bugs and vulnerabilities in any project, sharing a prize pool upon completion.

Code4rena & the Polkadot Assurance Legion (PAL) are transforming the traditional security audit process into a competitive arena

Simple & effective: Projects contribute to a reward pool, C4 leads an audit, and a community of experts hunts for vulnerabilities https://t.co/Dgj4cSqitH

— Polkadot (@Polkadot) January 29, 2024

The partnership kicks off on February 2, with HydraDX the first parachain to undergo a rigorous audit. HydraDX is a liquidity protocol for the Polkadot ecosystem that offers a trustless pool for multiple assets. For their efforts, the security experts, known as wardens on Code4rena, will share a prize pool of $100,500.

This will be followed up by a new campaign starting March 1st, whose focus will be on Phala, a platform for private smart contracts and dApps. The prize pool for the second quest will be $60,500. Three weeks later, on March 22nd, Acala’s audit will commence for a shared prize pool of $52,000. Acala is a cross-chain DeFi network built on Polkadot that offers features such as liquidity staking, a native stablecoin, and more.

With Code4rena, security audits are more rigorous as “auditors work creatively to find as many rare, high-risk vulnerabilities as they can,” the platform says.

Auditing on Code4rena is a profitable venture, with some developers minting millions annually by sharing the prize pools offered by various projects. In the last 90 days, the leading auditor raked in over $500,000, with two others making around $150,000.

Making Polkadot Secure: PAL Marches on With Mission

Security is the bedrock of the crypto industry, and yet, it has become increasingly harder for platforms and protocols to keep users’ assets safe. On Polkadot, PAL is taking on the mission to curb hackers, and its partnership with Code4rena is one of its landmark moves.

PAL launched last year as an initiative to finance—at least partly—security audits for parachain products. In a proposal last March, a consortium of developers from Acala, Phala, Manta, Astar, Interlay and other leading projects requested 540,000 DOT ($3.6 million) in funding to sponsor the audits.

As the proposers observed, Polakdot’s multi-parachain and forkless upgrade approach, while ground-breaking, increases the attack vectors for the network. This makes efforts such as PAL critical to the short-term security and long-term stability of the entire network.

In the vote, 77.5% of the participants (with 11.3 million DOT) voted in favor of the proposal, while 22.5% (with 3.3 million DOT) voted against it.