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Security & contracts

What the contracts do, what we've done to make them safe so far, what's still ahead, and how randomness works at the table.

Smart contract security​

Each real-money table is its own smart contract — a small program that holds money and follows fixed rules no one can change — deployed on Base, an Ethereum-based network with very low fees, when the Host creates the table. These table contracts are source-verified and readable on Basescan, the public block explorer for Base, so the actual code each contract runs is open for anyone to inspect. We don't currently maintain a public GitHub repo for the contracts — that may change.

The contracts are intentionally simple. They have:

  • Short functions with narrow input paths.
  • No admin override. Once a contract is deployed, no one can change its behavior.
  • No upgrade hook. The contract you sit at is the contract you stay at for that table's lifetime.
  • Extensive unit-test coverage.
  • A 24-hour emergency exit baked in as the unconditional player fallback.

An external audit is on the roadmap and not yet complete. Until that's done, the security story rests on simplicity, testing, the emergency exit, and what you can verify yourself on Basescan.

Trust model​

Stacked runs as two systems, each doing what it's best at. Full breakdown on How custody works.

In short: Stacked runs the game, and the on-chain contract holds the money. Your USDC, a digital dollar that holds a stable value, sits in the table contract — not with Stacked — and only the contract's rules can move it. You sign for any movement of your own funds, so your deposits and withdrawals are always under your control. Every real-money hand settles on-chain when it ends; settlement is fast (under 5 seconds on Base) and runs in the background, and you never pay gas — the small network fee for an on-chain action — to settle a hand or to create a table. If settlement ever stalls, the 24-hour emergency exit lets you pull your funds out yourself.

Randomness (RNG)​

Card shuffling happens on Stacked's servers using cryptographic randomness. This is the same model most online poker sites use; today there's no way to independently verify that a specific shuffle was honest.

Verifiable on-chain shuffling is coming. The plan is a commit-reveal scheme where each shuffle is committed on-chain before the hand and revealed at showdown, so any player can verify the cards weren't manipulated. When it ships, we'll document it here and on the How a hand of Stacked works page.

Until then, the trust story for RNG is: standard cryptographic randomness, no public history of integrity issues, and the broader contract guarantees (custody, settlement, emergency exit) limit what bad RNG could cost you in the worst case.

Reporting an issue​

If you find a bug, vulnerability, or anything that looks wrong, reach out through the community channel. We take security reports seriously.

What's next​