6 ♥ · Incentive · Draft
Peer Audit
Members with the same skills as the builder review the work before the DAO accepts or pays for it.
How it works
A team submits a piece of work, most often a smart contract, for review. The DAO opens the review to members or outside experts who could have built the same thing. Reviewers read the code, try to break it, and file findings with a severity rating. A judge or a panel removes duplicates and confirms which findings are real. The DAO pays reviewers from a fixed pot in proportion to the confirmed findings they reported. The team fixes the issues and the reviewers check the fixes before the work goes live.
Use it when
- You ship code that holds member funds and cannot afford one blind spot.
- Check a contributor's work without a manager, using people who know the craft.
- You want many independent eyes rather than one audit firm's opinion.
Watch out for
- Reviewers who are also rivals or friends of the builder may go too hard or too soft.
- A clean review is not proof of safety; reviewers only find what they look for.
Example
Code4rena. Code4rena has run open audit contests since 2021, where hundreds of independent researchers review a protocol's code and split a prize pool by confirmed findings.