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 additiona...