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Elliot Friedman, Builder, Smart Contract Engineer

TVL: $2,178,650,365  |  Total Transactions: 2,254,490 |  Deployed Smart Contracts: 67 |  Hack Losses: $0.00

Secure Governance Testing Framework

The world of blockchain and smart contracts is growing at an unprecedented pace. Developers are constantly upgrading their smart contracts through on-chain and off-chain governance. As decentralized applications become more complex, governance proposals play a crucial role in maintaining their smooth functioning and adaptability. However, testing governance proposals can be time-consuming and challenging, particularly when dealing with large systems of interconnected contracts.

Additionally, some teams are not able to exhaustively test new proposals due to limited resources and lack of tooling. This leads to needless hacks, liquidations, and security incidents. To streamline this process and provide developers with a robust tool for validating their proposals, we have developed the Governance Proposal Simulation Framework. This powerful and user-friendly tool enables developers to simulate various stages of governance proposals before deploying them on the blockchain.

Motivation

The motivation behind the creation of this framework is to enable developers to quickly identify potential issues in their proposals and ensure that they behave as intended. By simulating the entire proposal lifecycle, developers can identify and fix any problems that might arise during the actual deployment of the proposal, saving time, resources, and preventing potential vulnerabilities.

What does it do?

This framework is designed to test and validate governance proposals for smart contracts. It simulates the various stages of a proposal, making it easier to spot issues and confirm that the proposal behaves as intended. This allows users to test timelock and multisig proposals, covering a wide range of use cases in decentralized governance systems.

Developers can use this tool to test a series of proposals in a controlled environment, set up the testing environment, and run the proposals through different stages like deployment, after-deploy, build, run, teardown, and validation.

Types of bugs caught by the framework

This tool can help catch various types of bugs by testing the integrity of your protocol after a proposal. Using pre-and post-proposal condition checks, it can catch issues such as:

  1. Incorrectly linked contracts: identify situations where contracts are not properly linked together or are interacting with the wrong contract instances.
  2. Invalid state transitions: detect cases where a proposal results in an unexpected or invalid state transition in the system.
  3. Broken dependencies: identify broken dependencies between contracts, which could lead to unexpected behavior or vulnerabilities.
  4. Logic errors: catch logic errors in your proposal, ensuring that the proposal behaves as intended and produces the desired outcome.

It is important to note that while this tool does not guarantee that proposals are free of these types of issues, it provides developers with the tools to build tests and catch these issues before deploying proposals. This greatly reduces the risk of unexpected behavior or vulnerabilities.

Learn more

To learn more about the Governance Proposal Simulation Framework and how to use it, visit the GitHub repository: https://github.com/ElliotFriedman/forge-proposal-simulator