Web3 Antivirus 0.3: Simulate Transactions, Analyze Risks, Token Deals & Permissions

4 min readJan 5, 2023

Getting you the gist of what’s under the hood of the newest Web3 Antivirus version.

Welcome back, dearest adepts of web3 security! Hope you’re still feeling festive. We are excited to mark the beginning of 2023 with good news and celebrate our reunion. So let’s comb through the Web3 Antivirus’s updates — the team went the extra mile to make them epic.

Custom transaction simulation algorithms

Top on the list to unveil are further improvements to the security audit methodology. Especially in case you are an advanced web3 user, the upgraded mechanism is a must-have companion for it. The thing is, the 0.3 Web3 Antivirus version raises the bar of transaction simulation to new heights.

Meaning, nothing will be kept under wraps of transactions you’re willing to check, as W3A simulates each step involved as if you proceed and examines every contract behind. Even more, as you face the typical “should I stay or should I go” dilemma, we unprecedentedly visualize simulation of transactions you deal with.

While other vendors opt for external ready-made APIs or hide the simulation magic under the hood, it was a matter of honor for our team to bring it into the spotlight. Honestly, it cost us quite an effort to ensure such a level of visualization.

In a nutshell, we’ve expanded nodes and built advanced data parsing algorithms based on transaction tracing insights. Essentially, we scraped through extremely low-level Ethereum Virtual Machine-generated operational codes and parsed them to visually represent the simulation process.

Risk analysis & report upgrades

To take matters tightly when it comes to risky deals, W3A will provide even more details about the potential threats and vulnerabilities while qualifying them as technical risks, suspicious activity, vulnerable code detectors or hardcoded logic.

Basically, Web3 Antivirus enables you to see through the dangers like nothing else, as it takes care to distinguish between two categories of web3 phenomena and handles massive dedicated audits for each program, transaction, and asset.

Web3 protocols, projects & smart contracts audit

To help users firmly step up into big leagues of web3 disruptors, W3A undertakes comprehensive analysis of programs and transactions. Meaning, it’s able to save the day by warning about malicious schemes and fraudulent intentions behind the deals in question.

NFTs, collections & fungible assets analysis

As you invest in new assets or entire collections, nothing is going to scuttle the pleasure of shopping. That’s because the updated Web3 Antivirus version provides even more insights into deals with all kinds of tokens — from NFTs to fungible ERC20 ones.

Alongside reporting on your asset of interest’s historical data, W3A informs you on the risks (if any) associated with the deal, before you decide on proceeding with it.

Permission requests & approval addresses audit

Even more about assets, Web3 Antivirus helps keep your existing items in one piece, safe and sound. Specifically, the reasoning behind implementing this feature is that we’re striving to assist you in avoiding disturbing frauds like this one.

Ultimately, we wished to protect users from malicious activity behind smart contract addresses in cases when they are prompted to set an approval. Most web3 users know about the standard ERC/EIP20 tokens’ function that approves public returns. Say, before you swap assets through an exchange, a third-party user can be commissioned to spend your tokens on your behalf.

No secret that hackers have ways to exploit this procedure, as less experienced traders are often exclusively alert about scams around asking for private keys. Bad news is that some don’t even realize that by calling approve() on a bad token contract one can give permission to drain their account.

For you to easily crush this sophisticated and risky step, we are glad to present a long-awaited capability for many, detailed assessment of permission requests. The feature enables users to clearly understand if they are granting access to the assets they are unwilling to expose.

Believe everyone will appreciate receiving a message that straightforwardly explains who receives what as a result of approve() while W3A checks the address to rule out fraudulent activity.

The UI improvement: meet color codes!

We’re also dramatically updating Web3 Antivirus’s UI to make it more user-friendly and easier to navigate. Based on the extension’s UX analysis, it was decided to abandon the numerical risk score, as we realized it could be potentially frustrating and not necessarily helpful.

So we replaced it with a color code, where green means low risk, yellow calls for caution and extra research, and red warns of a high fraud probability.