Audits and Bug Bounties

Security audits and bug bounties are complementary, not interchangeable. An audit is a time-boxed review before launch; a bounty is an ongoing invitation for researchers to report flaws after code is live. Neither replaces the other, and neither guarantees an exploit-free protocol.

Users often treat "audited" as a binary safety label. In practice, an audit report is a snapshot: it lists findings, severities, and what was fixed. It does not cover future upgrades, governance changes, or economic attacks the reviewers never modeled.

When reading an audit, check the date, commit hash, scope exclusions, and unresolved medium or high findings. A clean executive summary can hide deferred risks that matter at scale.

Responsible disclosure programs give white-hat researchers a legal path to report bugs. Protocols without one may still get hacked — they just learn about vulnerabilities from headlines instead of encrypted emails.