Smart Contract Security in 2026: What to Include in an Audit

What the current evidence shows

CoinGecko's State of Crypto Security Report, published in August 2026, distinguishes contract vulnerabilities from infrastructure failures, compromised keys, and unaudited changes. Its sample includes incidents affecting previously audited systems. That does not measure an audit's causal effectiveness; it highlights the need to inspect the scope and the deployed version. Source 1 provides the reporting period and methodology context.

New functionality creates new permissions

Wallet delegation, token hooks, and custom trading logic make the boundary between components more important. A team should identify which contract can call which other contract, whose authority it uses, and what changes when a dependency is upgraded. An audit request that lists only the token address can miss the component that actually controls withdrawals.

A practical scope example

Consider a staking product with audited staking contracts, an upgradeable reward distributor, a price adapter, and an administrative signing service. The staking review alone cannot establish the safety of an upgrade signed through the service. Put each component on a scope map, identify its owner, and explicitly assign code review, configuration review, or operational assessment. This is a planning example, not a claim about a specific incident.

Make changes visible after the report

Maintain a record of the reviewed commit, deployment addresses, implementation versions, privileged roles, and excluded dependencies. Review changes to any of those items before describing the current deployment as covered. A new implementation, oracle source, hook, or signing policy can invalidate an assumption without changing the project's name.

Choose an audit around the risk

Ask how the proposed review tests asset conservation, privilege boundaries, and failure recovery. Agree whether external services and deployment procedures are covered or require a separate assessment. Price and schedule comparisons are more useful when the compared scopes contain the same components and remediation checks.

Prepare the first conversation

Send a short description of the product, its launch or upgrade stage, and the components that handle funds. Public code is helpful but not required for an initial enquiry. Before review starts, provide the intended deployment configuration and a frozen commit so findings can be tied to a reproducible version.

Review Checklist

• List every component that can move or authorize assets.
• Separate reviewed code from unreviewed changes and external infrastructure.
• Assign ownership for incident response and remediation verification.

Sources and Further Reading

1. CoinGecko: State of Crypto Security Report 2026

The linked sources describe the standards or research discussed above. Review scenarios are practical planning examples, not findings from an audit of a specific project.