By the end of this lesson you’ll be able to open any contract on a block explorer and answer five questions about it in ten minutes, and you’ll know why “audited” on a project’s homepage is a start and never a finish.
Why a holder reads contracts
The page about the code is enough, the way you’d read a company’s register entry before paying it. Every contract on Ethereum and the chains built like it has a page on a block explorer (Etherscan is the usual one; each chain has its own), and that page answers the questions that decide whether your money can be taken by someone other than you.
Researching a Crypto Project, lesson 3, covers who runs a project and who can change its code as a research question. This lesson is the security version: before your tokens touch a contract, what the page must show.
Verified
Is the source published and matched?
Proxy
What’s behind it?
Owner
Who holds which powers?
Changes
What changed, and who said so?
Audit
What did it actually cover?
Five questions for any contract page
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