Smart Contract Analysis Statement

Re-audit Scope

This statement replaces the one issued on 28 August 2026 and covers the staking contract as it stands at the pinned commit. The contract grew from eight hundred and three lines to eight hundred and sixty six, with ninety three lines changed, which is the smallest change among the four protocol contracts. All nine findings from the first round were re-verified against the new source. No new findings are recorded.

Contract Analysis

A holder delegates HCOW to exactly one representative. Rewards are funded in HCOW, never minted, and are released per second over a stated duration rather than in lumps, so every staked token earns for exactly the seconds it was staked. Each representative keeps a commission capped at ten percent, taken from its own delegators' share at the rate in force while it accrued. Unstaking has a seven day cooldown and the amount leaves the earning set the moment it is requested, so a leaving delegator neither earns nor blocks. Staked principal is never consumed here; that mechanism belongs to the profit sharing contract and mixing the two would make both harder to reason about.

Two changes since the first round account for most of the new code. A funding call of zero tokens is now valid when there is a carried balance to release, so rewards already committed no longer depend on new money arriving. And the count of active representatives is maintained on write rather than computed by walking storage on every read.

Ownership Privileges

No administrative action can move staked principal or reach accrued rewards. The owner can:

• Register a representative, up to a permanent ceiling of one hundred
• Update a representative's payout address, commission rate and active flag. Commission already earned is settled to the outgoing payout address before a repoint takes effect, so the owner cannot redirect a balance that accrued under the previous address
• Replace the reward funder, in one step, deliberately
• Nominate a successor owner, who must accept, and withdraw that nomination

The active flag gates new delegations only. It does not stop accrual, and cancelling a pending unstake is deliberately not gated on it, so the owner cannot convert a cancellable request into a forced exit by deactivating a representative mid-cooldown.

One power worth stating plainly, which the source now records: a compromised owner can consume all one hundred registry slots with junk identifiers and deactivate every genuine representative, permanently. That reaches up to a tenth of future emissions and freezes the registry. It cannot reach principal or accrued commission, because commission is accrued and frozen to the outgoing payout before any change is written. The mitigation is that the owner key is a multisig, and that belongs in the deployment checklist rather than only in a comment.

Security Features

• Rewards are funded, never minted. HCOW has a fixed supply and no mint function, so every reward paid was transferred in first
• Accrual is per second, which removes the moment a lump sum creates. A position staked for one block cannot be paid what a position staked all quarter is paid, and commission cannot be avoided by redelegating to a zero-commission representative for one block
• A funding call may add tokens or add time but may never lower the rate of a live period or pull its end date in. The two weaker forms of that guard the project records having tried are both genuinely exploitable, and the strict form is the right choice even though it refuses some honest top-ups in the tail of a fast period
• Commission is exact on every path. Every place that changes a representative's delegated weight is preceded by the accrual call, and a rate change freezes the net accumulator first so it cannot reach backwards into rewards already earned. That ordering is now pinned by mutation tests rather than by a comment
• A pool too small to move the accumulator has its released seconds carried rather than stranded or handed to whoever stakes next, and there is now a path to release the carry that does not depend on the funder choosing to fund again
• Solvency is maintained against the token balance rather than against the liability counter, which is deliberately a reserve rather than an exact sum; we re-derived the bound and the excess is at most one wei per harvest, in the safe direction
• Eight machine-searched invariant properties run at two hundred and fifty six runs and thirty two thousand seven hundred and sixty eight calls with zero reverts

Findings Summary

There were no medium or higher findings in either round, and none of the nine first-round findings has produced a new one. Seven are fixed, one is partially fixed with reasoning we accept, and one optimisation is declined with reasoning we also accept.

The registry ceiling is now protected by a test and by a mutation, which was the whole of what the finding asked for; slot reuse was correctly left unimplemented, because recreating a delegation outside the registry is what made the project's own earlier removal attempt unsafe. The carried reward balance now has a delivery path of its own, and the ordering detail that makes it work is right: the zero-amount guard sits after the accumulator has advanced, because the carried figure is written by that advance. The refusal of top-ups in the tail of a fast period is unchanged, correctly, and is now documented for whoever operates the funder role so a refusal reads as expected rather than as a fault.

On the question the response asks about this contract, our instruction is recorded in the findings: the reward funder setter should stay single step. The two risks are genuinely different. A mistyped funder address stops funding and is undone by the owner in one transaction, and the funder can do nothing else, because funding requires it to hold and approve the tokens itself. A mistyped owner address ends the ability to register or update a representative and to replace the funder, permanently. Ownership is now two step, which is where the asymmetry says the second step belongs.

The declined optimisation is the branch complexity of the funding function, and we would make the same call. A readability refactor of the densest arithmetic in the project, in the weeks before a re-audit, on a function where two of the project's own historical findings lived in the interaction between the two floors, is a real risk taken against a presentational gain. Doing it afterwards with this re-audit as the baseline is the right sequencing.

Note - This Audit report consists of a security analysis of the HCOWStaking smart contract. HCOW is a token on BNB Chain, not its own network, and nothing in this contract secures a chain or produces blocks; it records delegations, streams funded rewards and pays commission. Any external description should match that. We recommend investors do their own research before investing.