Overview
Vacuumlabs is a software company that builds financial products for other businesses: banks, lenders, trading firms and financial startups. Alongside that work it runs a blockchain team, which built a practice checking smart contract code, the self-executing programs behind blockchain applications, before that code starts handling real money1. Vacuumlabs is usually hired by the teams that build the apps, but it originated AdaLite and NuFi itself; both began inside the firm and are now separate companies in the Vacuum Group portfolio.
On Cardano, Vacuumlabs wrote much of the plumbing that lets a hardware wallet, a small physical device that keeps your keys offline, work with the chain at all2. It also built AdaLite, a Cardano wallet you open in a browser tab3, and publishes a set of developer tools for the Midnight network4. Its audit practice built expertise across Cardano, Ethereum and other Ethereum-compatible chains1; Vacuumlabs states that this team has since transitioned to operating under the Invariant0 brand5.
Key Features
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Keys that stay on a physical device. Vacuumlabs wrote and maintains Cardano hardware wallet software, including the Cardano app that runs inside a Ledger device2 and the library that wallet software uses to talk to that app6.
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A code review before the contract goes live. Vacuumlabs built an audit practice for smart contracts written in Plutus, Plutarch, Aiken and Solidity, starting with a review of the design rather than waiting for a finished build1. That team now continues under the Invariant0 brand5.
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Audit findings anyone can read. Vacuumlabs keeps a public archive of its audit reports covering lending, stablecoin and exchange protocols5, written to be readable by non-technical audiences as well as engineers1.
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A Cardano wallet with nothing to install. AdaLite opens in a browser tab and accepts a recovery phrase, an encrypted key file, or a Trezor, Ledger or BitBox02 device7.
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Developer tooling for Midnight. Vacuumlabs publishes a repository of Midnight tools, libraries and contracts for learning and debugging, including one that gives the same wallet functions as the Lace app through typed commands4.
What to Expect
The website is a corporate services site rather than a product you sign into. You browse service lines, client case studies and a long article archive, and the blockchain pages sit inside a much larger financial-software offering that dates back to 20128. One branch of that offering is aimed at banks rather than crypto users, covering shared credit lines run on smart contracts, escrow services, and payment cards that spend straight from a crypto wallet9.
Developers get more out of the GitHub side than the marketing pages. The Cardano repositories hold the AdaLite wallet3, the Cardano app that runs on a Ledger device2, the library that talks to it6, and a command line tool that lets stake pool operators sign transactions from a hardware wallet instead of keeping keys on a computer10. The Midnight repository gathers tools, libraries and contracts for working on that network4.
Organizations weighing the firm up have an outside record to read. The audit archive shows which projects Vacuumlabs has reviewed and what it found5. Input Output, the engineering company behind Cardano, names Vacuumlabs as a co-delivery partner for work on Plutus, one of Cardano's smart contract languages, in a funding proposal to the Cardano treasury11. Project Catalyst, Cardano's community grant program, publishes the proposals the audit team has put forward12. Hiring runs through a careers page listing offices in Bratislava, Košice, Prague, Brno and Budapest alongside remote roles13.
