I’m glad to see Spark CEO @hexonaut publicly addressing this issue.
With the launch of Mythos, the cost for hackers to find code vulnerabilities has dropped sharply, especially in large codebases—issues that previously existed but were hard to quickly identify are now being exposed much faster.
This is a concern widely shared by industry participants and market players.
In response, Sam said: For most core DeFi smart contracts, the codebases are typically small enough, critical enough, and have undergone long-term audits, real-world testing, and community oversight. Traditional security methods—including audits, formal verification, bug bounties, rate limiting, timelocks, and multi-sig governance delays—still provide a high level of security confidence. The real amplified risks stem more from large-scale infrastructure, complex backend systems, permission management, and off-chain components. Once these systems are compromised, the attack surface rapidly expands.
I agree with his perspective. Compared to newer systems, well-established DeFi smart contracts that have been battle-tested over many years carry relatively lower inherent risk. If DeFi can emerge from this wave of challenges with a stronger focus on minimizing code, minimizing permissions, implementing rate limits, using timelocks, and enforcing modular isolation to contain risks within manageable bounds, it could actually become stronger than before.