There is no best smart contract audit firm, and a ranked list of ten is an answer to a question nobody asked. The firm that fits a 400-line vesting contract is not the firm that fits a cross-chain lending market, and neither is the firm that fits a Solana program or a zero-knowledge circuit.
What decides your shortlist is the engagement model. Five different products are sold under the word audit: a fixed team reading a specific commit, a time-boxed public contest, a marketplace that assembles independent researchers, a bug bounty on live code, and a subscription that re-scans every commit. They price differently, they take different amounts of your time, and they find different things. Compare quotes across two of them and the numbers are meaningless.
Disclosure, because it should change how you read this page.
Fidesium is a smart contract audit firm. We are on this list. We are not at the top of it, because there is no top: nothing here is ranked. Every factual claim about another firm is something that firm publishes about itself, linked to the page it was read on, on 2 September 2026. Where a firm publishes no price, this page says so instead of guessing. And no firm’s security-outcome claim appears anywhere below, ours included, because none of them is independently checkable.
Last updated September 2026.
Five models sold under one word
| Model | What you are buying | How you pay | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fixed-team review | Named engineers booked for a window, reading a specific commit | Fixed fee, quoted after scoping | Novel logic, a hard deadline, a report you will show investors |
| Competitive audit | A time-boxed contest, many independent researchers, findings judged and deduplicated | A prize pot, plus platform fees | Well-specified code, breadth of eyes, a public artefact |
| Researcher marketplace | Individual reviewers matched to your stack and assembled per engagement | Per researcher, per week | Niche stacks, or staffing a review you are managing yourself |
| Bug bounty | Continuous incentive on live code, paid only for valid findings | Per finding, by severity | After launch, on top of a review, never instead of one |
| Continuous scanning | Automated analysis re-run on every commit, pull request and deployment | Subscription | Code that keeps changing after the report is filed |
These are complements, not rivals. A protocol shipping real value usually ends up with a fixed-team or competitive review before mainnet, a bounty after it, and something watching the repository in between.
Which model fits your situation
This is the table to read first. It is about your situation, not about who has the best logo.
| Your situation | Start with | Why |
|---|---|---|
| One or two standard contracts, pre-launch, tight budget | Continuous scanning, then a scoped fixed-team review of the custom parts | Standard plumbing is what automated analysis is good at. Pay humans for the logic you wrote yourself |
| Custom DeFi maths going to mainnet with real value behind it | Fixed-team review, then a bounty | Curve maths, oracle assumptions and incentive design are reasoning problems. They need reviewers who will argue with your spec |
| A Solana program, or anything that is not Solidity | A firm that names your language on its own site | Rust, Move, Cairo and CosmWasm scope off program structure, not line count |
| A bridge, a node client, cryptography or ZK circuits | A specialist consultancy, not a general audit shop | This is a different discipline that happens to touch a blockchain |
| Code that changes weekly after launch | Continuous analysis plus a re-review policy agreed in advance | A report describes one commit. Your users are on a different one by Friday |
| An enterprise customer is asking for security evidence | A firm that publishes reports you can hand over | Procurement wants an artefact with a date and a scope, not a badge |
| You have an audit already and the code has moved | A review of the diff, not a fresh full audit | You are paying for the delta. Say so when you ask for the quote |
The firms, by what they actually are
Grouped by model, not ranked. Every row links the page it was read on.
| Firm | Model | Named coverage beyond Solidity | Publishes a price | Public reports |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trail of Bits | Fixed team, senior consultancy, since 2012 | Rust on Solana, Cairo, Move, Go node clients, cryptography, ZK, AI/ML | No | 620 public audits |
| OpenZeppelin | Fixed team, alongside the contract library everyone imports | Rust, Cairo, Go, and zero-knowledge proof audits | No | Indexed on their site, 900+ audits claimed |
| CertiK | Fixed team, quote on request, formal verification practice | “More than a dozen” Layer 1s named, no language list published | No | Surfaced per project on Skynet |
| Hacken | Fixed team, with a fixed-fee retainer option | Rust, Move, Go, Cairo and more, across 30+ named chains | Yes. “from $3,000 to $100,000+” | Audits index, plus a documented public API |
| Quantstamp | Fixed team, and it also sells smart contract insurance | “20+ languages”, “55+ ecosystems supported” | No | 300+ public reports |
| Cyfrin | Fixed team, plus CodeHawks competitions, plus free education | Rust, Vyper, across 18 named chains | No, but it publishes its contest payout formula | Report library and GitHub archive |
| Hexens | Fixed team, two senior teams run in parallel | Rust, Move, Vyper, Cairo | Yes. “from $30K for focused smart contract reviews to $1M+” | Not indexed on the page we read |
| Oak Security | Fixed team, sold as an ongoing security partner | Rust, CosmWasm, ink!, Soroban, and ZK circuits in Noir and Cairo | No | GitHub archive |
| Sherlock | Contests, staffed collaborative audits, bounties, plus optional Shield coverage | “Major onchain environments”, EVM and Solana given as the example | No | GitHub reports, leaderboards |
| Cantina, including Spearbit | Researcher marketplace and bounties, now led by an agent platform | EVM and Solana, evidenced by the portfolio rather than listed | No | Portfolio, researcher leaderboard |
| Code4rena | Competitive audits and bounties. Winding down, see below | Rust, Go, Solana, Stellar and Cosmos tagged per contest | Prize pots published per contest | 355 published reports |
| Consensys Diligence | Described by Consensys as “our offensive security team”. The site has moved off consensys.io | EVM and Solidity tooling focus | Not verifiable to us, see the source notes | Historic reports in the GitHub org |
| Immunefi and HackenProof | Bug bounty platforms, live code only | Protocol agnostic | Pay per valid finding, per-programme maximums published | Bounty programmes and payouts listed publicly |
| Fidesium | Continuous scanning plus fixed-team manual audits | EVM specialism, with Solana | Yes. From $5,000, and $399 a month | 23 reports across 16 protocols |
Three things changed in 2026, and most lists have not caught up
Code4rena is winding down. Its own homepage carries the notice: “Code4rena is winding down. After 5 years of securing DeFi, Code4rena is closing its doors. Active competitions and bounties are being seen through to completion.” Its 355 published reports and its leaderboard stay valuable as a public record of who found what. Just do not plan a launch around booking one.
Spearbit now sits inside Cantina. spearbit.com serves one line, “Spearbit now lives on Cantina.”, and the name survives there as a researcher network and a distinct tier that Cantina’s docs describe as “bespoke audits led by elite, hand-selected researchers” with “team sizes typically of 4-5 security researchers”. Cantina has moved its own marketing site to cantina.security and now leads with an autonomous agent platform, and its live opportunities page currently lists bounties, so ask before you plan around a competition.
Consensys Diligence has moved off the Consensys domain. consensys.io/diligence redirects to diligence.security. Their MythX page carries its own notice, “we have made the difficult decision to sunset the MythX™ suite”, while Mythril, the open-source symbolic execution tool, is still maintained.
Read the stat blocks more carefully than the marketing
Most firms, us included, publish aggregate figures, and more than one of them disagrees with that same firm’s other pages: audit counts, ecosystem counts and finding counts that change depending on which page you land on. That is what live counters do. It is also a good reason to shortlist on reports you can read rather than on a headline number from anybody, including us.
The AI question, which is now a real fork in the road
Several of the largest names have put models inside the review loop and say so plainly. Sherlock’s Audit Engine is “AI auditors, advanced models, and researchers combined in one review”. Cantina leads with an autonomous agent. Hexens describes “pairing manual review with frontier AI as a force multiplier”. CertiK combines “expert manual review of smart contract code with advanced AI and mathematical techniques”. Cyfrin’s Aderyn is “an open source, AI powered, Rust-based Solidity static analyzer”.
Fidesium is on the other side of that fork deliberately. Our automated layer is deterministic static and abstract syntax tree (AST) analysis, so the same commit produces the same findings twice, and the humans are the core team rather than contractors running a scan. Neither choice is wrong. It is a real trade between reach and reproducibility, and it is worth asking any firm which side they are on and why.
How to check any of this yourself
Every claim on this page, ours included, is checkable, and it takes about twenty minutes.
- Read two of their recent reports, not their landing page. A report shows you finding quality, severity discipline and how a firm writes up a fix. Most of the firms above publish an archive, linked in the table. Ours are at /audits/.
- Search the firm in a findings database. Solodit, run by Cyfrin and free to browse, describes itself as “the largest open source database of blockchain and smart contract security vulnerabilities, exploits, and mitigations”.
- Read their docs, not their marketing. Sherlock’s, for one, publish a scope-to-timeline table running from roughly 500 nSLOC (normalised source lines of code) at about 3 days to roughly 6,000 nSLOC at about 38 days. It is the clearest public statement of how review time scales with code that we found anywhere in this set.
- Ask for the last three reports on your chain, in your language, rather than the best three.
Four questions to ask before you sign
- What commit? Scope is a repository, a branch and a commit hash, with an explicit in-scope and out-of-scope file list. “Our protocol” is not a scope.
- Who is reading the code? Named reviewers, and what they have shipped in your language.
- How many fix verification rounds are included? Remediation is where a cheap quote becomes an expensive one.
- What happens when the code changes? Get the re-review policy and its price in writing while you still have leverage.
Where Fidesium fits, and where it does not
We build in the continuous lane. A traditional audit certifies a commit on one day, and then the code moves. Our own post on it puts the problem in three words: audits do not fail, assumptions drift. So we re-run audit-grade analysis on every commit, pull request and deployment, and we mint each audit as an on-chain NFT, so the record is verifiable and permanent rather than a PDF in someone’s downloads folder.
The offer, with the numbers published rather than quoted on request:
| What you are buying | What it is |
|---|---|
| Manual audit | From $5,000. Line-by-line human review, logic and economic risk analysis, two rounds of fix verification, a public report, and one month of continuous scanning (/manual-smart-contract-audits/) |
| Continuous scanning | $399, $799 and $1,499+ a month, with manual review available as an add-on on every plan (/pricing/) |
| Tooling | Deterministic static and AST analysis, run by the team that built it |
| Chains | EVM specialism, with Solana |
| Public record | 23 reports across 16 protocols at /audits/, counted on 2 September 2026 |
Where we are not the answer
If you need a ZK circuit reviewed, a consensus client examined or a cryptographic primitive assessed, hire a specialist: several are in the table above and we are not one of them. If your board wants the name a non-technical investor recognises without asking, that is a real requirement and we are not it yet. And if you are going to mainnet with nine figures behind it, $5,000 is not the relevant number. The quote for your actual scope is, and it will be larger.
What nobody on this page can sell you
An audit does not make a contract safe. It is evidence about a version of your code, produced by people who read it carefully, and it starts decaying the moment you merge the next pull request. Anything sold as a guarantee is a certificate, and certificates do not survive contact with a live protocol.
Frequently asked questions
Who are the best smart contract audit companies in 2026?
There is no single answer, and any page that gives you one is ranking firms against a situation that is not yours. Match the model to what you are shipping: a fixed-team review for novel logic, a competitive audit for well-specified code, a specialist consultancy for cryptography or a bridge, continuous scanning for code that keeps changing, and a bug bounty on top once you are live.
How do I choose a smart contract auditor?
Shortlist on three things and ignore the rest. Does the firm name your language and chain on its own site, can you read two of its recent reports, and will it commit to a scope in writing as a specific commit hash and file list. Then ask what a re-review costs before you sign, not after.
What is the difference between an audit contest and a fixed-team audit?
A contest puts many independent researchers on your code for a fixed window and pays out of a prize pot, which buys breadth and a public artefact but needs code that is already well specified. A fixed-team audit books named engineers and buys depth, continuity and someone who will argue with your design. Neither replaces the other.
Which smart contract audit firms publish their pricing?
Very few. Most of the category quotes on request after a scoping conversation. Of the firms on this page, Hacken publishes a range on its smart contract audit page, Hexens publishes an engagement range, Cyfrin publishes its contest payout formula rather than a price, and Fidesium publishes a manual audit floor of $5,000 and subscription tiers of $399, $799 and $1,499+ a month. Contest platforms publish prize pots per engagement, which is a different thing from a price.
Is a cheap smart contract audit worth it?
That depends on what you are comparing. Two quotes for “an audit of our protocol” can differ tenfold and both be honest, because they are not quoting the same scope. Compare the file lists, the reviewer weeks and the included remediation rounds. A low price on a narrow scope is not a bargain, and a high price on a scope you did not need is not diligence.
Do I need a new audit after changing my smart contract?
If the change touches in-scope code, yes, usually as a review of the diff rather than a fresh full audit. The report you already have is a statement about one commit. That is the whole reason continuous analysis exists: something has to look at the commits between the audits.
Do I need an audit or a bug bounty?
Both, in that order. A bounty pays for findings on live code, which means the first person to find a bug does so while your users’ funds are already exposed. A review happens before that. A bounty is how you keep paying attention afterwards.
Who audits Solana programs?
Ask each firm directly, because coverage is uneven and a Solidity track record does not transfer. Trail of Bits, Oak Security, Hacken, Cyfrin and Quantstamp all name Rust or Solana on their own pages, and Fidesium’s Solana reports are in the public portfolio. Ask specifically who on the team has shipped Solana work, and to see a recent Solana report.
What are the alternatives to the largest audit firms for a small protocol team?
The category is much wider than the three or four names most people can list, and it includes competitive platforms, researcher marketplaces, smaller fixed-team shops and subscription tooling. For a small team the binding constraint is usually scheduling and budget rather than quality, so narrow the scope to the code you wrote yourself and buy depth there.
Can I verify a firm’s track record myself?
Yes. Read two recent reports from their own archive, search the firm in Solodit, and ask for the last three engagements on your chain rather than the best three.
Get a quote
Tell us the repository, the commit and the file list, and we will come back with a scope and a price. If a different model on this page fits you better, we will say so.
Request a quote · Read our published audit reports · See scanning prices
