As decentralized finance (DeFi) enters its next phase of maturity, security has emerged as the defining foundation of sustainable growth. In 2025, Certora strengthened its leadership as the most trusted security partner in the blockchain ecosystem, securing $196.5 billion in onchain assets and supporting the majority of DeFi’s most critical protocols through long-term, continuous security engagements.
With the blockchain industry surpassing $2.5 trillion in onchain value, the scale and complexity of modern protocols have introduced new vulnerabilities across chains, languages, and execution environments. Certora’s approach goes beyond traditional audits. The company embeds security into the core of protocols through formal verification, deep economic analysis, and long-term security partnerships.
“These numbers reflect how much the industry has changed,” said Seth Hallem, CEO of Certora. “Security today isn’t about catching obvious bugs at the last minute. It’s about proving correctness in systems that manage billions of dollars, evolve continuously, and interact across chains. Our growth in 2025 mirrors the ecosystem’s shift toward long-term, infrastructure-level security.”
“The most mature protocols no longer think of security as a one-time audit,” said Mooly Sagiv, Certora’s Founder and Chief Scientist. “They choose a security partner who understands their economics, their architecture, and how their system behaves over time. What we’re seeing is a clear industry shift from ‘audit coverage’ to ‘correctness guarantees.’”
Trusted by DeFi’s Leading Protocols
In 2025, Certora served as the long-term security partner for 70% of the top 20 DeFi protocols by Total Value Locked (TVL) and 70% of the top 10 protocols, including industry leaders such as Aave, Compound, Lido, EigenLayer, Morpho, and Stellar.
Many of these partnerships span multiple years, reflecting the industry’s shift away from one-off audits toward continuous security assurance as protocols evolve and scale.
During the year, 44 new protocols entered security engagements with Certora, further expanding its footprint across the Web3 ecosystem.
Security at Unprecedented Scale
Certora reviewed hundreds of thousands of lines of code across diverse blockchain environments in 2025, including EVM, Solana, Sui, Aptos, NEAR, blockchain infrastructure, mobile applications, and off-chain systems. This broad coverage highlights the firm’s ability to secure complex, multi-chain systems operating under real-world economic and technical stress.
Preventing the Hacks That Never Happened
Through rigorous analysis and formal verification, Certora identified and prevented:
- 80 critical vulnerabilities
- 180 high-severity vulnerabilities
- 360 medium-severity vulnerabilities
Ninety-nine percent of all identified issues were fixed before deployment, and eleven protocols were paused prior to launch after severe risks were uncovered. Certora also detected ten live vulnerabilities in already-deployed systems, reinforcing the importance of continuous security beyond launch.
Formal Verification as a Security Guarantee
In 2025, Certora advanced formal verification beyond isolated functions to system-wide invariants, mathematically proving properties such as protocol solvency, economic correctness, and governance safety. This approach enabled the identification of subtle failures rooted in economic assumptions, rounding errors, and cross-system interactions.
Built for the Long Term
Certora’s work uncovered accounting and economic flaws that would only surface years later, including hidden insolvency risks, overpayment of interest, and long-term economic distortions. By analyzing protocols across time, Certora helped teams build systems designed for long-term resilience.
World-Class Security Talent
In 2025, Certora quadrupled its security research team to 40 experts, including 25 PhDs specializing in formal methods, cryptography, and systems research. Every engagement is led by senior researchers and supported by automated analysis, formal proofs, and repeated manual reviews.
Looking Ahead
Certora has been awarded a research grant from the Ethereum Foundation to help verify the correctness of autoprecompiles, an important optimization powering the Foundation’s zkEVM initiative, developed by Powdr Labs. Autoprecompiles improve zkEVM performance by accelerating cryptographic and arithmetic operations, but their correctness is critical to ensuring security at scale. Through this grant, Certora and Powdr Labs will develop new formal verification techniques to mathematically guarantee these optimizations, supporting a faster, more scalable, and more secure zero-knowledge future for Ethereum.
The protocols that succeeded in 2025 treated security as foundational infrastructure rather than a checklist. Certora remains proud to support these teams and continues to advance the future of secure decentralized finance.
Website
X
