Coinbase unveils security tool to detect Smart Contract risks

With the global Smart Contracts, market size projected to reach $345.4 million (by 2026) from $106.7 Million in 2019, increased concerns about security risks have been looming over major exchanges. 

In the light of this, US cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, recently unveiled new tools to detect and classify smart contract security risks. In a blog posted on June 23, the exchange announced that it had successfully developed a tool called Solidify that will be:

“Used to help automate, standardize, and scale the process of smart contract security analysis and classification”

In the last couple of years, the smart contract market size has seen an increased revenue which can be credited to the adoption of various applications in the industries like supply chain, banking, government, insurance, and real estate. 

Additionally, the rising popularity of blockchain tech is fueling the demand for the smart contracts market. However, amid news like Binance Smart Chain DeFi project BurgerSwap being hacked for $7 million and later PancakeHunny suffering an exploit, security concerns have been on the rise lately. 

In efforts to evade security risks, Coinbase’s Solidify will be used in tandem with Coinbase’s Asset Hub, a process to streamline its process for new listings launched in early May.

This is how Solidify will work

Coinbase, in a blog post, acknowledged that manual smart contract analysis is a time-intensive and error-prone process. They underlined that Solidify will use a large signature database and a pattern matching engine to effectively detect contract features and their risks.

It will enable, automated smart contract scanning that allows standardizing and scoring smart contract risks, suggesting mitigation strategies, and generating detailed reports. It will be further used to aid the decision on whether or not Coinbase should list the asset. It said:

“Solidify evaluates security risks of hundreds of smart contracts either fully automatically or through identification of unique functions that require additional manual review.”

They further added that, Solidify works with the OpenZeppelin library’s ‘asset pause’ function which is present in the majority of smart contracts. The tool is said to aggregate instances of the code and automatically check its status and validity.

The crypto exchange giant stated that Solidify has about 6,000 unique signatures which are used to match risks against any given smart contract.

Enterprises focusing more on smart contract security 

The crypto exchange giant has joined a fleet of crypto companies that are laying more focus on the security and risk mitigation side of smart contracts. In June beginning, the DeFiYield protocol had announced the introduction of, what they claim is, the world’s first web archive of Smart Contract audits. 

Their blog post highlighted an increased interest in “user safety” and listed 1,095 decentralized finance (DeFi) projects as part of the archive, at the time of writing.