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Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Before deploying an Ethereum or EVM smart contract, check that its intended behavior and trust assumptions are documented; privileged actions are restricted and tested; invariants, edge cases, external calls, and integrations have been reviewed; tests and analysis findings are understood; and deployment, verification, key security, monitoring, and incident procedures are ready. An audit can uncover defects, but it cannot guarantee that a contract is safe.
This checklist is aimed at developers and technical reviewers preparing an Ethereum or EVM contract for deployment. Adapt it to the target chain, language, compiler, architecture, and threat model. It helps organize review; it does not prove a contract secure or replace project-specific expert judgment.
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1. Define what the contract must do and what it trusts
Review is more effective when expected behavior is specific enough to test. Write down the contract’s purpose, the assets or permissions at risk, and the conditions that must remain true as state changes.
- Describe the intended behavior of each user-facing feature and the expected result of important state transitions.
- List the actors the system relies on: users, administrators, signers, oracles, tokens, and other contracts.
- Identify external dependencies and assumptions about their behavior, including token and DeFi integrations.
- State the critical security properties and invariants reviewers should check. Examples should come from the actual design, rather than generic assumptions about what a contract ought to guarantee.
- Record the threat model: what an adversary can call, supply, influence, or cause to fail, and which powers remain trusted.
2. Trace permissions and every privileged action
Map who can change the system and what each privilege allows. Do not review only the obvious owner or administrator function: trace the full set of state-changing paths and role-management actions.
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- List functions and roles that can configure the contract, pause it, upgrade it, mint assets, withdraw funds, or grant and revoke permissions.
- For each sensitive action, verify that the intended role can perform it and that unauthorized callers are rejected.
- Test role transfers, role revocation, and emergency paths, including the resulting state and any restrictions on later actions.
- Check inheritance and storage-variable authorization where relevant to the implementation.
- For multisignature controls, verify the intended participants and approval process as part of the role and key design; multiple signers do not by themselves establish that the permissions are correct.
3. Review state transitions, inputs, and invariants
Follow the contract through ordinary and adversarial sequences, not just isolated happy-path calls. A function may be safe on its own but unsafe after another operation changes state or when called in an unexpected order.
- Test normal, boundary, invalid, and unusual inputs, including values at the edges of permitted ranges.
- Exercise state-machine transitions in different orders and check that invalid transitions fail as intended.
- Test core invariants across sequences of operations, not only after a single call.
- Consider property-based or stateful tests, fuzzing, and formal verification where the project’s risk and the quality of its specification justify them.
- Review static-analysis findings individually. A clean tool report is not proof that the contract is free of defects.
Ethereum.org’s testing guide says: “For these reasons, testing smart contracts before deploying to Mainnet is a minimum requirement for security.” Unit tests are a starting point; they should be complemented with analysis appropriate to the system.
4. Inspect external calls and integration assumptions
Calls beyond the contract’s own code introduce behavior the contract does not fully control. Examine where control can leave the contract and what the surrounding system assumes will happen.
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- Review external calls and token or DeFi integrations for unexpected behavior, including reentrancy risks.
- Check the order of state updates and external interactions. Ethereum.org describes checks-effects-interactions as one way to reduce reentrancy risk.
- Review assumptions about oracles, counterparties, and other external systems against the contract’s actual failure and trust model.
- Consider front-running and cryptographic operations as part of the threat review; automated analysis may not assess these project-specific risks well.
5. Check dependencies, standards, and the compiled source
Review what the contract imports and what its published source claims to implement. A library or standard can reduce avoidable implementation work, but neither removes the need to inspect how the project uses it.
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- Prefer well-tested libraries and manage dependencies rather than copying code without a clear reason.
- Check claimed standards conformance against the actual implementation and integrations.
- Inspect compiler output and warnings, and confirm the intended compiler configuration is used for the release artifact.
- After deployment, verify the source so others can check that the published code corresponds to the bytecode deployed on-chain. Verification makes code inspectable; it does not establish that the code is secure.
6. Make the upgrade and failure plan explicit
The response to a defect depends in part on whether deployed code can change. Decide how changes and emergencies are handled before deployment, and review the plan against the actual authority structure.
If the system is upgradeable
- Review who is authorized to upgrade and the controls required to execute an upgrade.
- Check proxy and migration assumptions, including how state is expected to carry forward.
- Write down the upgrade procedure and how the proposed migration will be checked.
If the system is immutable
- Account for the fact that deployed code cannot simply be patched.
- Make sure the project understands what operational or architectural options remain if a serious defect is found.
7. Validate the release and prepare operations
Review the deployment as its own security-sensitive process. A sound source tree is not enough if the wrong artifact, configuration, address, or privileged wallet is used.
- Confirm the compiled artifact, compiler configuration, deployment target, and constructor or initialization parameters.
- Test deployment scripts and integrations in an appropriate test environment, then check that the intended address and runtime code are present after deployment.
- Plan source-code verification for the deployed contract and compare the published source with the deployed bytecode.
- Secure privileged wallets and keys, and check that operational access matches the intended permission model.
- Define what will be monitored, who should be contacted if something goes wrong, and how the incident response will proceed.
8. Scope an independent review and close findings
Give reviewers enough context to evaluate the system’s real risks: scope, architecture, intended properties, and relevant dependencies. Make clear whether the review covers only contract code or also architecture and integrations, and what methods are expected, such as manual review, static analysis, dynamic testing, or formal methods.
- Provide architecture documentation and the intended properties and invariants.
- Track findings through remediation, then retest the changes rather than treating a written response as closure.
- Check that the review covers the relevant chain, language, dependencies, deployment assumptions, and privileged operations.
- Read the scope and limitations of the final report. Ethereum.org cautions: “That said, you should avoid treating audits as a silver bullet.”
Ethereum.org and OpenZeppelin guidance cited here was available as of October 4, 2026. The checks above do not assess a particular contract or chain-specific rule; teams should verify that their review matches the system they are actually deploying.
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