How Certora security shaped DeFi risk management in 2025

In 2025, DeFi shifted into a new maturity phase where Certora security became central to protecting value across chains and protocols.

DeFi enters a security-first era

By 2025, decentralized finance reached $2.5 trillion in onchain value, marking a decisive jump in scale and complexity.

However, that growth also exposed fresh vulnerabilities, new attack vectors, and structural gaps in security posture across the blockchain ecosystem.

Companies increasingly realized that security is not just about pre-launch bug hunting. Rather, it is about ensuring systems remain robust as they upgrade, expand to new markets, and support evolving user demands over time.

Against this backdrop, Certora did more than keep pace with DeFi. The firm positioned itself as the risk partner that high-value protocols now require, expanding its security footprint across chains, languages, and infrastructure layers throughout 2025.

Securing the top DeFi protocols

In 2025, Certora deepened its role as a core DeFi security partner for leading protocols measured by TVL. Fourteen of the top 20 protocols and seven of the top 10 relied on the company not just for audits, but for long-term collaboration.

Overall, 70% of the top 20 DeFi protocols by TVL are Certora customers. Moreover, 70% of the top 10 work with Certora through continuous, long-horizon security programs rather than one-off assessments.

This approach reflects an industry-wide shift toward continuous security engagement, where risk management evolves in tandem with protocol roadmaps, governance changes, and market conditions.

Key long-term security partners

Several blue-chip projects have maintained multi-year engagements with Certora, underscoring the demand for durable defenses. As of 2025, the list includes:

Aave: 5+ years

Compound: 5+ years

Sky: 4+ years

Morpho: 4 years

Silo: 4 years

Safe: 3+ years

EigenLayer: 3+ years

Lido: 3 years

Stellar: 2 years

And that list only covers the upper tier. In 2025 alone, 44 new protocols began security engagements with Certora, including Fluid, Jito, Navi, Polygon, Suilend, and others. That said, the broader customer base now spans dozens of additional platforms across the crypto stack.

Collectively, these engagements meant Certora helped protect $196.5 billion in assets in 2025, reinforcing its position at the center of DeFi risk management.

Security at scale across chains and stacks

Modern DeFi protocols rarely operate on a single chain or execution environment. In 2025, Certora reviewed hundreds of thousands of lines of code across the broader web3 landscape, applying crosschain security review practices to every major stack.

EVM: 200,700 LOC

Solana: 206,600 LOC

Sui: 33,000 LOC

Aptos: 16,300 LOC

NEAR: 6,000 LOC

Blockchain Infrastructure: 90,000 LOC

Mobile Applications: 14,000 LOC

Off-Chain Systems: 36,000 LOC for EigenLayer Hourglass, SafeNet, Cork, Lido tooling, and more

This breadth reflects a philosophy that serious security must match the diversity of DeFi itself. Moreover, the work spanned every environment and execution model, correcting failure modes and common developer pitfalls.

Ultimately, Certora focused on understanding how systems behave under stress, irrespective of their chain, language, or time horizon. That systemic viewpoint is increasingly critical as capital and complexity converge in onchain finance.

Measuring real value beyond TVL

Total value locked remains a key indicator, but it does not fully capture where risk lies or how it is mitigated. Certora’s activity in 2025 cut across infrastructure, governance mechanisms, and user-facing applications, providing a broader lens on security impact.

$90B in assets secured through design review and protocol invariants verification, where correctness was mathematically proven rather than assumed

150 audits completed across chains, execution environments, and system layers

720+ vulnerabilities identified and prevented ahead of deployment

99% of all findings fixed by teams prior to launch

11 protocols paused before deployment after uncovering severe risks

These outcomes highlight a shift away from box-checking exercises. Instead, 2025 showed that effective security work directly changes protocol trajectories, launch decisions, and ultimately user protection.

The hacks that never happened

One way to measure impact is by assessing incidents that were prevented before they could reach mainnet users. In 2025, Certora identified a significant distribution of vulnerabilities across severity classes.

80 critical vulnerabilities

180 high-severity vulnerabilities

360 medium-severity vulnerabilities

These were not cosmetic issues. Rather, they included flaws that could have created insolvency absent a direct exploit, permanent freezing of user funds, unliquidatable debt positions, governance capture, and silent economic drift that would surface only months later.

In one extreme case, a single protocol contained up to 80 distinct issues, illustrating how fragile complex systems can become under real-world conditions. Moreover, Certora uncovered 10 live bugs in already-deployed systems, underscoring that serious onchain vulnerability prevention must continue well after launch.

Where the frontier of risk is shifting

Throughout 2025, many of the most consequential failures did not stem from obvious syntax errors. Instead, they arose from flawed economic assumptions, cross-system interactions, and subtle protocol logic.

Among the issues Certora mitigated were a math error capable of inflating effective interest rates by up to 2,000×, and a liquidation failure mode linked to Ethereum‘s Fusaka upgrade, where per-transaction gas limits could generate unliquidatable positions.

In addition, the team identified rounding problems that violated core invariants such as share rate monotonicity. However, these were not the kinds of bugs simple pattern matching could catch. They required deep protocol understanding, economic security analysis, and close tracking of chain-level changes.

Designing for long-term solvency

A large share of Certora’s work in 2025 centered on the long-run economic solvency of clients. Rather than validating only a snapshot in time, audits examined how state transitions evolve across years or even decades.

Through this lens, the team exposed multiple accounting flaws that would have manifested only in the distant future. That said, their eventual impact could have been severe, including chronic overpayment of interest, broken solvency invariants without a direct exploit, and accumulating “ghost debt” that permanently distorts protocol economics.

Although some systems initially appeared correct in static checks, they broke down when long-term behavior was modeled. This finding reinforced the importance of dynamic analysis for sustainability.

Why formal verification became central

As capital volumes increased, protocols increasingly sought proof of correctness, not just confidence. In 2025, formal verification audits at Certora moved beyond isolated function checks to cover system-wide properties that must always hold.

Many of these properties involved safety and liveness guarantees central to user trust. For example, the team focused explicitly on system-wide invariants that, once defined and proven, harden a protocol’s most critical assumptions against edge cases.

This evolution also marked a key moment for the broader industry, as more teams integrated formal methods into development pipelines rather than treating them as an afterthought.

Examples of properties formally proven

In 2025, Certora demonstrated comprehensive proofs for several high-profile protocols and components. Among them:

Aave v4: share rate is monotonic; user actions cannot make healthy accounts unhealthy; no collateral implies no debt

Euler Earn & Kamino: protocol solvency is formally proved

Silo: consistency is balanced across supply and withdrawal queues

Stellar: expired allowances cannot be reused

Together, these examples show how formal methods and protocol invariants verification can transform abstract assumptions into machine-checked guarantees across complex systems.

Scaling the research engine

Behind these results sits a sizeable research organization. In 2025, Certora quadrupled its security research team to 40 experts, including 25 PhDs in formal methods, cryptography, and systems design.

The company also established four dedicated research teams, enabling specialized focus areas while maintaining cross-protocol knowledge sharing. Moreover, each audit is led by best-in-class researchers, supported by formal verification tooling, automated analysis, and repeated manual review cycles.

These teams form long-term relationships with clients, working across multiple audits, protocol versions, and new product rollouts. As a result, auditors often remain involved through deployment and beyond, reviewing launch settings, initialization paths, and governance procedures.

The strategic role of Certora security in 2026 and beyond

By the end of 2025, it was clear that the most successful protocols did more than ship features quickly. They partnered with Certora early, integrated deep verification into their development lifecycles, and treated security as core infrastructure rather than a compliance step.

Moreover, the data from 2025 suggests that this model is reshaping expectations for how DeFi projects should manage risk. From multi-chain code reviews to complex invariant proofs, the sector is converging on higher standards.

Looking ahead to 2026, Certora plans to build on this momentum, combining research, tooling, and field experience to make high-assurance security a baseline expectation for every major protocol.

In summary, 2025 showed that when security is engineered, not improvised, DeFi can scale safely, protect users, and support long-term growth across the global crypto economy.