Tackling a (human) scalability problem

Ethereum is on a solid path towards scalability thanks to innovations such as general-compute in zero-knowledge, interactive provers, efficient commitment schemes, and data-availability sampling. These innovations are the fruits of years of uncompromising focus on a maximally decentralized, secure, and credibly neutral blockchain.

But there are bottlenecks that need scaling, such as security.

There is an acute shortage of software auditing talent. Considering how much value at stake in blockchain systems, solving this bottleneck is essential to getting these trust-minimized systems ready for broader societal adoption.

With this bottleneck in mind, our model takes a different approach to auditing. We are nimble, with minimal admin overhead. We audit communally, in a collaborative environment between our residents/mentors/guest auditors on one side, and our fellows on another.

The scalability gain comes from the fact that a few outstanding fellows from each fellowship are invited to stay on as a resident, which then helps us scale the size and quality of the next batch of fellows, and the virteous cycle continues..

The model is also attractive to projects looking for audit: more eyes on their code. Not only is the code audit by resdient and guest auditors as usual, but there are 20+ fellows joining. It is not unusual that some fellows outperform veteran auditors in the quantity and quality (severity and complexity) of bugs uncovered.

We have two fellowship tracks: smart contracts, and zero-knowledge. The former is typically 5-6 weeks, while the latter is 3-4 months.

The smart contract fellowship gave birth to our smart-contract professional auditing arm: yAudit. We accept audit request both within and outside of the fellowships. Contact us if you are looking for an audit.

We will be spinning out a zAudit arm of zAcademy 4Q24 focused on auditing zero-knowledge codebases.