Overview
MLabs is a British software consultancy that companies hire to build software and to check existing code for mistakes before it handles real money. Its engineers write new systems, review code other people wrote, and produce evidence that a program behaves the way its owners say it does1. The work centres on Haskell and Rust, two programming languages whose strict rules catch whole classes of error before a program ever runs2.
Much of that work lands on Cardano. MLabs reviews smart contracts, the programs that hold and move funds on a blockchain, and it helps maintain three of the tools other Cardano teams write those contracts with: Plutarch, LambdaBuffers and the Cardano Transaction Library1. Several of those tools were paid for by Project Catalyst, Cardano's community grant programme3. Cardano's own audit guidance, CIP-0052, names MLabs among the ecosystem's audit organisations4.
Key Features
- A second opinion before the code goes live. MLabs audits Cardano smart contracts written in any of the main contract languages, Aiken, Plutarch or Plinth, covering both the on-chain rules that guard funds and the off-chain code that assembles transactions5.
- Findings arrive as failing tests. Each weakness MLabs reports is demonstrated by a test that fails before the fix and passes after, and that test stays in the client's own suite rather than in a document5.
- A price you can check line by line. Audits are quoted on effective lines of code, counting only code that can actually be wrong: comments, blank lines, imports and tests are excluded. MLabs shows the per-file count and pins the quote to one named version of the code5.
- A published catalogue of what goes wrong. MLabs keeps a free guide to eleven recurring flaws in Cardano smart contracts, each written up with the rule it breaks, a test that demonstrates it, and the damage it would cause6.
- Tools MLabs maintains for the ecosystem. MLabs develops the Cardano Transaction Library, a PureScript framework for building Cardano transactions. Its public repository names Indigo Protocol, Liqwid, Clarity, PlayerMint and SingularityNET among the projects running it in production7.
What to Expect
The MLabs site sells services, not a product. There is nothing to sign up for and no dashboard to log into. An engagement starts with a free conversation, then a mutual confidentiality agreement, then a fixed price1.
Four service lines organise the work: advice on what to build, software development, verification, and running the systems that handle logins, passwords and security certificates1. Verification is the line most Cardano readers arrive for, and it reaches well past blockchain. MLabs states that it reverse-engineered and rebuilt the payments system at Juspay8.
Teams not ready for a full audit can buy a fixed-price fourteen-day health check, which reviews how a system is structured, how well it is tested, and how it handles memory, then returns a technical roadmap and a remediation report9. The blog is where the reasoning shows. One post walks through how a sale contract that checks each purchase correctly on its own can still let a buyer walk off with two items for the price of one10.
