Continuous Security & Threat Monitoring

Sherlock provides active security protection for deployed Web3 protocols through bug bounties and AI-powered continuous monitoring, maintaining vulnerability discovery throughout the operational lifecycle of live production code.

Bug Bounty Program

Sherlock's bug bounty service surfaces exploitable issues under real-world operating conditions through stake-gated submissions where researchers must post collateral with every vulnerability report. This mechanism filters out low-effort, speculative, and duplicate submissions before they reach protocol teams, significantly reducing triage burden.

Every submission is validated by senior lead auditors who confirm impact and assign appropriate severity levels. The service features active triage with direct involvement from Sherlock's in-house security team during response coordination. Importantly, bounties inherit context from prior security reviews (audits and contests), enabling researchers to focus on what matters and surface high-impact issues faster.

The economically motivated bounty pool draws Sherlock's 11,000+ ranked researchers who specialize in finding live, high-impact vulnerabilities, creating steady adversarial pressure on deployed contracts. When protocol code updates, researcher attention updates accordingly, maintaining continuous security oversight throughout the protocol's evolution.

Sherlock AI Monitoring

Sherlock AI brings researcher-level security intelligence to every commit during the development cycle. The platform integrates natively with GitHub repositories, running automated security checks on every commit and pull request. Each code update is analyzed against models trained on thousands of validated vulnerabilities from Sherlock audits and contests.

The AI system performs heuristic pattern recognition informed by Sherlock's audit history, combined with structural reasoning over control flow, state transitions, access control, and call ordering. It provides context-aware analysis modeling how functions compose across modules, inheritance trees, and external calls - reading codebases for vulnerability patterns that span contract boundaries.

For each identified vulnerability, Sherlock AI provides recommended remediation steps and creates automated verification tests to confirm that fixes close the issue. This catches vulnerabilities early before audits, reducing expensive late-stage security work and cutting audit rework in half by delivering cleaner code for review.

Lifecycle Security Integration

The combination of bug bounties and AI monitoring represents continuous threat intelligence across the full protocol lifecycle. Development insights from Sherlock AI inform the audit process, audit findings shape the scope of post-launch monitoring, and bug bounty discoveries feed back into future development planning. This integrated approach means context built during earlier phases carries forward, enabling researchers to focus on novel attack vectors rather than rediscovering known patterns.

Protocols benefit from security work that compounds across phases - each engagement strengthening subsequent ones through shared context and accumulated knowledge about the protocol's specific architecture and risk profile.