Market Landscape

The smart contract auditing space has become an essential component of the blockchain ecosystem, driven by the increasing complexity and value of decentralized applications. Billions of dollars are managed by contracts across DeFi, NFTs, gaming, and enterprise use cases — making security failures not just technical setbacks, but existential threats to protocols and users alike.

---

Current Landscape

The current auditing market is largely centered around manual, report-based auditing services. These providers rely heavily on human auditors reviewing smart contract code and publishing time-bound reports. While this model has historically served its purpose, it suffers from key limitations:

• Time Lag: Security feedback is only provided at discrete moments in the development cycle — before deployment or during point-in-time audits.
• Scalability Bottlenecks: As code volume grows, relying solely on manual review leads to delays and backlogs.
• Static Threat Models: Manual audits often miss emergent vulnerabilities or behavioral issues that only manifest in live environments.
• No Post-Deployment Coverage: Once the contract is deployed, most systems provide no continuous monitoring, leaving real-time exploits undetected.

These gaps expose a large part of the Web3 ecosystem to risk, especially as contracts upgrade, interact with others, or experience novel usage patterns.

---

Sentinel's Approach

Sentinel addresses this market gap by moving beyond static, one-time audits and introducing protocol-level, AI-driven continuous security. Rather than acting as a one-off service, Sentinel is an embedded security layer that follows contracts from deployment and throughout their lifecycle.

Key distinctions in Sentinel's approach:

• Continuous Monitoring: Contracts are audited in real time after deployment. Behavior is tracked, scored, and re-evaluated as interactions evolve.
• AI-Driven Inference: Instead of relying solely on predefined threat signatures, Sentinel uses model-based anomaly detection to catch unknown or emerging vulnerabilities.
• Protocol Integration: By being built on Metis and leveraging AΛITH, Sentinel treats security as a native layer of the stack — not an external audit.
• Immutable Threat Memory: Sentinel maintains a decentralized and append-only threat intelligence database, enabling both machine learning and human reasoning to build on past security data in a transparent, shared way.

---

Opportunity Space

The smart contract security space is evolving rapidly, and the demands of developers, users, and regulators are increasing just as fast. There is a growing need for:

• Scalable, autonomous auditing
• Real-time exploit detection
• Persistent, evolving security models
• Trustless, verifiable vulnerability reporting

Sentinel is positioned to serve this next phase of the market — not by replacing traditional audits, but by enhancing and extending the security lifecycle of smart contracts before, during, and after deployment.