New York City, New York, January 21st, 2026, Chainwire
New data highlights Certora’s rapid growth, expanding role in continuous security, and leadership in formal verification.
Today, Certora, leading provider of formal verification tools and smart contract audits for Web3 protocols, released its 2025 Year-in-Review Report, revealing that the company helped secure $196.5 billion in total value locked (TVL) across the DeFi ecosystem and prevented more than 720 vulnerabilities from reaching production. According to the report, 14 of the top 20 DeFi protocols by TVL worked with Certora in 2025, representing roughly 70% of the category, while 7 of the top 10 protocols maintain continuous, long-term security engagements with the company.
$2.1-$2.4 billion was lost to crypto exploits in 2025, marking a year-over-year increase as DeFi activity rebounded and protocol architectures grew more complex. Certora’s report highlights several structural shifts in how leading teams approach security, including:
* A move away from one-off audits toward continuous security relationships
* Increased focus on protocol-level invariants rather than function-level checks
* Expanded audit scope to include deployment configuration, governance, and operational security
* Growing recognition that blockchain upgrades and validator behavior introduce new security risks
In 2025, Certora completed approximately 150 security audits, identifying 80 critical and 180 high-severity issues, with 99% of all findings fixed prior to deployment. In 11 cases, Certora advised protocol teams to delay or halt launches entirely after uncovering severe risks that could have resulted in systemic failure or loss of funds.
“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.'”
To meet this demand, Certora doubled its security research team in 2025 to approximately 40 researchers, including 25 PhDs, expanding deep expertise across execution environments such as Ethereum, Solana, Sui, Aptos, and emerging blockchain infrastructure.
The report highlights how the frontier of risk has shifted away from surface-level vulnerabilities toward economic edge cases, cross-chain assumptions, language-specific pitfalls, and protocol behavior under changing chain conditions, including network upgrades.
In 2025, Certora secured more than $90 billion in TVL by design, using formal verification to mathematically prove critical protocol invariants such as solvency, monotonic interest rates, and user safety conditions.
The full report is available at: https://www.certora.com/blog/momentum-for-2026. For more information, please visit certora.com or follow @Certora.
About Certora
Certora is the security assurance partner trusted by the most advanced teams in Web3. Founded in 2018 by pioneers in programming languages and formal methods, Certora helps leading protocols like Lido, Aave, Uniswap, and Compound secure billions in value with confidence.
