A protocol can pass a smart contract audit and still be exploitable, because the attack surface is the contract plus everything that touches it: upgrade scripts, governance, keepers, APIs, frontends, and deployment tooling. Read on:

Audits matter, but they are point-in-time and scoped. Risk builds in the delta between what was reviewed and what is running after upgrades, integrations, dependency changes, and emergency patches.

The failures that hurt most rarely look like “a bug.” They look like intended behavior: a privilege path that becomes reachable, an oracle assumption that breaks under thin liquidity, or an invariant that fails across a multi-step flow.

Whole-system coverage starts with scope. Treat onchain code, offchain services that influence state, signing infrastructure, admin tooling, CI/CD, and the frontend transaction builder as first-class security surfaces.

Make the diff the unit of security. Every PR can introduce a new privilege edge or transaction path, so verification has to follow change, not calendar checkpoints.

Model privileges as a graph, not a list. You want to know the shortest path to upgrade, pause, mint, drain, or change oracle sources, including role transfers and admin handoffs that rarely get revisited.

Hunt for invariant breaks, not only known vulnerability patterns. Define what must always be true across flows: accounting, permissions, oracle assumptions, rate limits, message ordering - and test and monitor those invariants continuously.

Pair prevention with detection. Managed detection and response reduces the time between “something changed” and “funds are at risk,” especially around governance actions, key usage, infra changes, and abnormal onchain behavior.

AI threat intelligence helps when signals are noisy and cross-domain. It can correlate code diffs, dependency updates, infra events, and onchain telemetry to surface the few changes that deserve immediate human review.

Security is a lifecycle: threat modeling, audits across web3 and web2, competitions and bug bounties, managed detection and response, incident response planning, and institutional diligence via Web3SOC.