Today, building on Ethereum can be tempting but potentially dangerous. Projects struggle to move fast and ship products while protecting users from known and unknown security risks. OpenZeppelin Defender is the first secure operations platform for Ethereum projects to securely automate their smart contract operations, speeding up development and minimizing risk. Defender was developed over the past year in collaboration with Compound Labs, Aave, dYdX, PoolTogether, Balancer, Foundation Labs, and other leading teams. Defender is the new gear Ethereum projects have been waiting for.
One of the largest challenges facing the Ethereum ecosystem today is the lack of standard tools to manage high-value smart contracts. Projects spend time piecing together existing tools or building handmade scripts for use cases beyond their core activity and area of expertise. This results in significantly slower product releases and additional risks to end users.
Through our experience conducting over 150 security audits with leading teams, we discovered that there are no comprehensive solutions to manage risks in production after a project is released. OpenZeppelin’s Contracts, the leading smart contract library for Solidity developers with over 2 million downloads, has been seminal in allowing developers to implement smart contract standards safely and quickly. Defender is the next step in our mission to protect the open economy.
The first cohort of select teams already implementing OpenZeppelin Defender include Compound Labs, Aave, dYdX, Balancer, Props, PoolTogether, Opyn, Status, Foundation Labs, Dharma, and TrustToken.
First cohort of OpenZeppelin Defender users
“Working with high-value smart contracts can be stressful. OpenZeppelin Defender relieves that stress by dramatically reducing the room for human error, making smart contract management simple and safe – it’s a no brainer that will improve the security and efficiency of any team.” – Peter Watts, CTO of Props
“OpenZeppelin has been a longtime leader in developing Solidity best practices and security recommendations. With Defender, they are tackling the most urgent needs of dapp developers one at a time, starting with making Ethereum DevOps sane. Defender is an invaluable tool for any team that needs to manage smart contracts after they are deployed.” – Ken Schiller, Software Engineer at dYdX
As of today, OpenZeppelin Defender is open and free to use with Ethereum testnets (Ropsten, Rinkeby, Kovan, Goerli). We are currently receiving applications from teams interested in joining the selected group of projects using Defender on mainnet. To learn more and apply for mainnet use, please visit the Defender website.