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Defi is attacked, but not threats against which industry is used to defend. While the developers are meticulously scan lines of code for vulnerabilities, the attackers have changed tactics, exploiting economic weaknesses which are unnoticed under impeccable programming.
For example, the Jelly Jeton feat on Hyperledger, where the attackers were able to siphon more than $ 6 million in the Hyperledger insurance fund, is an excellent example. This feat was not at all caused by coding errors, but by playable incentives and not taken risks that no one had examined.
Cybersecurity DEFI has traveled a long way. Intelligent contract audits – designed to catch bugs in software code – are the standard today. But we have urgently expanded its scope beyond simple lines of code. Intelligent contract audits are fundamentally inadequate, unless they also analyze economic and theoretical risks. The excessive dependence of industry on audits only of the code is obsolete and dangerous, leaving projects vulnerable to an endless cycle of attacks.
Recent attacks overlook the danger of economic exploits
In March 2025, the hyperliquid scholarship, which made its contracts audited, was ambushed by an exploit of $ 6 million involving its jelly token. How? The attackers did not find a bug in the code; They designed a short pressure by abusing the own logic of hyperliquid liquidation, by pumping the price of Jelly and manipulating the risk parameters of the platform.
In other words, hyperliquid designers had not evaluated in certain market behaviors – surveillance that traditional audits have not caught. The case of hyperliquid shows that the impeccable code cannot save a project built on trembling economic assumptions.
Shortly before Jelly’s incident, Polter Finance, a Loan Loan Protocol, was drained by $ 12 million thanks to a Flash loan attackAnother type of common attack based on the economy, not on coding vulnerabilities. The attacker has contracted flash loans and handled the project price oracle, bringing the system to process without value as well as billions of people.
The code did exactly what it was supposed to, but the design was imperfect, which allows an extreme price swing to go bankrupt the platform. The feat turned out to be so devastating that Polter Finance, a promising project, was forced to stop operations.
These are not isolated attacks / events; They are part of an increasing scheme in DEFI. In the case, after the case, intelligent opponents exploit protocols by manipulating market inputs, incentives or governance mechanisms to trigger results, developers did not provide. We have seen efficiency farms evolved by reward gaps, stabbing ankles attacked via coordinated market movements and insurance funds drained by extreme volatility.
Strengthen audits with economic and theoretical analysis of the game
The traditional audits check if “the code does what it is supposed”, but which checks if “what is supposed to do” is logical in opponents? Unlike a closed program, protocols DEFI live in a dynamic and contradictory environment. Prices fluctuate, users adapt strategies and protocols interconnect in a complex way.
While most web teams have engineers that can capture software bugs during development, few have internal economic expertise, which makes it essential to fill this gap and identify the vulnerabilities of incentive design and economic logic.
Really rigorous audits include a theoretical and economic analysis of the game, which involve examining things such as fees, liquidation formulas, collateral parameters and governance processes. They force listeners to consider: “Given these rules, how could someone enjoy it by folding them?”
For example, during an audit carried out by OAK Security, we discovered that the insurance fund of the perpetual exchange platform could be completely drained by volatility because it had not taken into account the “risk of vega” – the sensitivity of the protocol to volatility – in its pricing model. It was not at all a code bug – it was a design defect that would have caused the collapse of turbulent markets. Only a theoretical and economical deep dive caught it – and fortunately, we were able to report the problem before launch.
These economic exploits are well documented, and not terribly difficult to spot – but they only surface when the listeners ask the right questions and do not reflect on the code on the page.
The founders must demand more listeners
The founders of the protocol should ask the listeners to examine all the components of a trading system, including implicit and out -of -chain logical components, to ensure complete safety. In the best scenario, any critical mission logic would be brought to the channel.
If you are founder or investor, it is essential to ask your listeners: what about the manipulation of Oracle? What about crunch liquidity scenarios? Have you analyzed Tokenomics for attack vectors? If the answer is a silence or a stitching by hand, you should dig more deeply.
The cost of these dead angles is simply too high – the incorporation of the economic and theoretical analysis of the game is not only a “pleasant to have”; It is a matter of survival for DEFI projects. We must cultivate a culture where the code examination and the economic examination go hand in hand for each major protocol.
Let’s raise the bar now – before another lesson in several million dollars forces our hand.
