DeFi product development
Lending, staking, vault and AMM products from mechanism design through to interface.
- Engagement
- Phased build with a go or no-go decision after simulation
- Typical timeline
- 12–14 weeks to audit sign-off
- Starts with
- A two-hour session pulling the mechanism apart, looking for the way to profit from it.
Most protocol failures are not compiler-level bugs. They are economic, a price feed that can be pushed for a single block, an incentive that pays more to attack than to use, a liquidation path that stops functioning at exactly the moment the market makes it necessary.
A protocol that behaves as designed under stress.
What we build
Concrete artefacts, handed over and documented.
- 01
A mechanism specification stating the economic assumptions in plain terms, and what the system does when each one turns out to be false
- 02
Simulation of the design under stress, thin liquidity, correlated moves, an adversary with real capital, run before implementation begins
- 03
Contracts implemented against that specification, with invariants covering the economic properties rather than only the arithmetic
- 04
An oracle strategy with the cost of manipulating it calculated, plus defined behaviour for stale or diverging prices
- 05
An interface that shows position risk honestly, including the number telling a user how close they are to liquidation
- 06
An incident runbook: what can be paused, by whom, within how many minutes, rehearsed at least once before launch
What changes
The economics are attacked in simulation before they are attacked with capital
Auditors receive a specification with intent behind it, which is where the valuable findings come from
Your team knows what to do in the first ten minutes of an incident
How it runs
- Weeks 1–3
01Mechanism and simulation
We model the design and try to profit from it, then change the design until that is expensive.
- Weeks 4–10
02Contracts and interface
Implementation with economic invariants, oracle handling and a front end that tells users the truth about their risk.
- Weeks 11–14
03Testnet, audit, rehearsal
Public test deployment, an external audit cycle with time for two rounds of fixes, and a live incident drill.
Chosen per project. Named here so you can see the shape of it.
- Solidity
- Foundry
- Chainlink
- Arbitrum
- wagmi
- The Graph
Questions we get asked
Tell us the outcome, not the tooling.
Send us the situation you are in. We will tell you which discipline it belongs to, what we would do first and what it costs, including when the answer is to wait.