Guardian Audits announces Vanguard security program and $1M audit security fund

Guardian Audits, the smart contract security firm founded by Owen Thurm in 2022, has rolled out a new top-tier security program called Vanguard alongside a $1 million fund designed to cover audit costs for qualifying crypto projects. The catch: this isn’t a bag of cash. It’s grant-backed audit coverage, meaning teams get the security work paid for rather than a wire transfer to spend however they please.

What Vanguard actually includes

The Vanguard tier is built around a layered defense model that goes well beyond the standard “one firm looks at your code” approach. Each audit engagement deploys two independent auditor teams working in parallel, a structure designed to catch what a single team might miss.

Beyond human reviewers, the program incorporates AI-assisted code analysis and exhaustive fuzzing, a technique that bombards smart contracts with random or semi-random inputs to surface unexpected behavior.

Then there’s the $100K defender contest baked into the audit process. After the initial review wraps, external security researchers are incentivized to poke holes in the results. It’s essentially a structured bug bounty layered on top of a completed audit, creating an additional checkpoint before code goes live.

The $1 million Security Fund covers the cost of these engagements for selected projects. Applications are currently open, with Guardian evaluating candidates based on project timelines, deployment readiness, and risk profiles. The firm is specifically targeting high-risk windows like mainnet launches, token generation events, and protocol migrations.

Guardian’s track record and positioning

Guardian claims to have identified more than 300 critical vulnerabilities since its founding and says it has helped secure between $45 billion and $50 billion in digital assets across its client base. The firm maintains a public audit portfolio on GitHub.

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