Announcing the General Availability of OpenZeppelin Defender: A New Era in Blockchain Security and Operations

After a successful beta phase, we are thrilled to announce the General Availability (GA) release of OpenZeppelin Defender 2.0 – a mission-critical platform for decentralized applications security, operations, and automation. Defender is built from the ground up to be Web3 native and the go-to tool for any project, at any phase and at any scale.

And it doesn’t come alone! Defender is part of a comprehensive offering, building on top of the  OpenZeppelin Contracts open source libraries - used by 100% of top 20 DeFi protocols than 90% of the smart contracts, ensuring your project follows security best practices by scanning through your code and dependencies. Defender is also integrated into our Audit Services enabling teams to track issues and resolutions and interact directly with auditors for faster and more efficient communication.

The beta phase concluded with the participation of over 4,000 developers, including teams at leading protocols and financial institutions. Their engagement and feedback allowed us to fine-tune and improve new and existing features Here is a quick overview of key features and how you can use them in your project.

And if you already want to take it for a spin yourself, sign up for free now.

Ensuring High Quality And Vulnerability Free Code

Defender’s Code Inspector feature integrates seamlessly into your development workflow, providing tools that help catch vulnerabilities early, and ensuring your project is built on a secure, solid foundation.

By installing Code Inspector’s Github Application, a report will be automatically generated with every pull request, or by demand, and provide you with a full list of potential issues lurking in your code and verify your dependencies don’t include any known vulnerabilities. In addition, it will provide recommendations on how to improve your code quality, test coverage, and gas estimations. Soon you can also run Code Inspector to scan deployed contracts.

Automate and Operate at Scale

Defender is packed with robust features designed to automate and simplify the operation of smart contracts at scale. From using Relayers to submit on-chain transactions without the overhead of managing private keys, nonce, gas pricing estimation, and resubmission, to getting full visibility into your smart contracts, in real-time, using Monitor, and Actions allows you to extend and customize Defender for your needs. All three are fully integrated to support a variety of use cases such as triggering notifications and alerts for specific events or functions in your contracts, automatically pausing contracts when a potential threat is detected, supporting gasless transactions, and reacting to off-chain events like user sign-ups. Finally, there is Access Control which provides a friendly user interface to manage permissions so you can easily control which addresses are assigned to which roles.

Secure and Easy Deployment

Deploying smart contracts can often be a complex and risky process. With Defender, it doesn't have to be. We've designed our Deploy API to ensure secure and easy deployment of your applications with minimal changes to your existing deploy scripts. When deploying through Defender, it will automatically perform bytecode verification, perform various upgrade checks such, as storage slot allocation, and come with out-of-the-box support for deterministic deployments using CREATE2.

Need Another Network Support? We Got You!

With the increasingly growing number of L2 and L3, as well as modular and App Chains, more users requested the ability to support networks in Defender. With the new version, you can configure any EVM-compatible network as a Private Network and use it just like any other supported network and enjoy the automation and operations benefits of Defender.

The Right Plan For Your Project

We believe that access to top-tier security and operations tools should scale with your project. That's why we're introducing new subscriptions designed to grow with you. Whether you're just starting or managing a large-scale project, our flexible pricing ensures you have access to the Defender platform in a way that best suits your needs. Each plan will give you different quotas, access to premium features, and just as importantly, support from our team of experts. More information to help you choose which plans will work best for you is available on our website.

Sunsetting Defender 1.0

As part of this release, and like all good things, the Defender legacy version will come to an end and will reach end-of-life on June 1st, 2024. If you are an existing Defender 1.0 user, fear not! The new Defender supports all existing 1.0 functionalities, and we have developed upgrade assistance for a smooth transition with a few clicks. So hurry up and upgrade, after the sunsetting period, it will no longer be accessible and your account will be automatically suspended.

The GA release of OpenZeppelin Defender marks a significant milestone for the blockchain development and security space. Together with our Contracts libraries and professional services, we're excited to offer developers a comprehensive platform to build the future of Web3. Thank you for joining us on this journey and, if you don’t have an account yet, we invite you to sign up for free.