Migration guide
OpenZeppelin Defender is gone.
Here's your monitoring back in 10 minutes.
Defender shut down on July 1, 2026. If your Sentinels went dark with it, this guide maps what you had to what ChainWatch does — honestly, including what we don't replace — and gets you covered again today.
What maps over
| Defender | ChainWatch equivalent |
|---|---|
| Sentinel — contract monitoring | Watch rules. Add any contract address on 6 EVM chains; five tunable detection rules (large transfers, mint/burn anomalies, pause events, ownership/admin changes, oracle deviations). |
| Sentinel conditions | Per-contract thresholds. Denominated in whole tokens, scaled to decimals — dust doesn't page you. Every rule tunable or switchable off per contract. |
| Notifications (Slack, Discord, Telegram, email) | Webhooks to Slack, Discord, and PagerDuty — delivered in seconds, with a one-click test button per webhook. |
| Monitor dashboard | Command-center dashboard — status hero, human-readable alerts with recommended actions, per-contract monitor health. |
What we don't replace: Autotasks and Relay. ChainWatch is monitoring-only and read-only by design — it watches public chain data and pages you; it can't move funds or automate transactions. If you relied on Autotasks for automation, keep that layer separate (Gelato and similar cover it) and let ChainWatch be the tripwire.
Migrate in 5 steps
- List your Sentinels. Export (or screenshot) each monitored contract address, network, and its conditions before your Defender access fully lapses.
- Add your contracts. Open the ChainWatch app, connect any wallet (your wallet is your account — no signup form), paste each contract address, pick the chain. About 30 seconds per contract.
- Recreate conditions as rules. Large-value Sentinel → large-transfer rule with your threshold. Pause monitoring → pause-event rule. Admin/ownership Sentinel → ownership-change rule. Mint watching → mint/burn anomaly rule.
- Point webhooks at your channels. Add Slack/Discord/PagerDuty webhook URLs per contract, then hit the test button to confirm delivery before you need it for real.
- Run a history scan. Paste any contract into the free scanner on the homepage — it replays recent blocks through the detection engine so you can validate your thresholds against real history, not guesses.
Honest differences
- No transaction automation. Defender's Relay/Autotasks executed transactions; ChainWatch never will. That's a deliberate security property, not a missing feature.
- Self-serve pricing. Pro is $39/mo in USDC on Base — no enterprise contract, no sales call. If you were on a Defender paid tier, you'll likely pay less.
- Fewer chains, deeper focus. Six EVM chains (Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, BNB Chain) instead of Defender's full list. If you need another network, tell us.
- Read-only = smaller attack surface. Nothing to hold keys for means nothing to compromise.
FAQ
Can I import my Defender config automatically?
Not yet — Defender's export formats vary. The manual path above takes ~10 minutes for a typical setup. If you have a large Sentinel fleet, email hello@usechainwatch.com and we'll help migrate it.
What about my Autotasks?
ChainWatch doesn't run code on your behalf. For automation, pair us with a dedicated automation service and use ChainWatch webhooks as the trigger signal.
How fast are alerts compared to Defender Sentinels?
We poll new blocks roughly every 15 seconds with automatic RPC failover. Block confirmation to your Slack channel is typically under 30 seconds.