Smart contract development and Ethereum auditing platform, ZK Labs has announced the launch of an Audits Initiative for non-ICO projects within the blockchain ecosystem.
In a company update, Matthew Di Ferrante, founder of ZK Labs explained that the initiative will sponsor audits for projects that have not carried out any form of ICO and have no plans to do one. This, according to him is part of his company’s pursuit towards securing the ecosystem.
Relief
There has been a significant drop in the rate at which new projects raise funds through ICOs. The number of monthly published ICOs has dropped from 526 ICOs in March 2018 to just 59 ICOs in February 2019. This represents a significant drop of around 90 %. This relative scarcity of investments is making it difficult for a lot of new projects to develop effectively.
The initiative by ZK Labs will come as a huge relief to the beneficiaries considering the cost-effective advantage that this will avail to them. The free service comes from one area of a number of services offered by ZK Labs which includes security consulting/training, audits, and protocol design and analysis.
According to Di Ferrante, the ZK Labs Community Audits Initiative is open to both non-profit and profit-oriented Ethereum-based blockchain ventures, as long as it can serve as a utility to the community. By this condition, even platforms with some sort of built-in fees may qualify, as long as there is a fundamental utility. While such projects like gambling platforms are excluded from the offer.
Support For Grassroot Projects
The drastic decline in the influx of independent investments has had a telling effect on the development of new projects in the blockchain ecosystem. Hence, the difficulty experienced by an emerging project in executing capital intensive processes like project security and auditing. Also, legislation has made it more difficult for projects to access institutional funds in the form of grants.
The new initiative by ZK Labs aims to eliminate these bottlenecks and offers a lease of life to qualified projects.
Di Ferrante says: “The point of the community audits initiative is for grassroots projects to be able to receive quality audits without needing to think about raising large amounts of funding before the project can go live, and without having to go through a complex ECF-type application process for a grant.”
Di Ferrante mentions examples of projects that are considered eligible for this exercise to include tooling and libraries important to the development ecosystem (e.g., web3js, solc), non-profit smart contract infrastructure (e.g. ENS, Multisig wallets), open source crypto code/libraries (e.g., ZoKrates).
There are already two beneficiaries for the initiative, SolidStamp, and Token Subscription.
While SolidStamp is a platform that connects smart contract users and auditors to ensure the safety of their funds, Token Subscription enables applications to create a trustless subscription model without their users needing to constantly and manually transfer tokens.