What Is CertiK?
In short
CertiK is a blockchain security company that provides smart contract audits, formal verification and on-chain security monitoring to blockchain projects; its audit reports are among the sources referred to when assessing a project's security.
CertiK was founded by computer science academics from Yale and Columbia universities. In the company's audit process, experts manually review smart contract code, run automated analysis tools and classify the vulnerabilities they find by severity. Formal verification, which is based on proving that code satisfies certain mathematical properties, is one of the company's prominent methods rooted in its academic background.
Besides audits, the company publishes security scores, on-chain monitoring and incident alerts for projects through its platform called Skynet, and it also provides team identity verification (KYC) services to some projects. Whether an audit badge on a project's website is genuine can be checked by seeing whether the report appears on CertiK's own channels.
An audit is a review of the code as it stood at a specific point in time and is not a security guarantee. Risks such as code changes made after the audit, economic attacks, misuse of admin keys or a rug pull by the team may fall outside the scope of the report. Indeed, audited projects have also suffered exploits.
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