The Solana Foundation on Monday announced a new security auditing framework for Solana-based protocols and an incident-response network, citing rapidly evolving adversary capabilities. The foundation and Web3 security firm Asymmetric Research unveiled the Solana Trust, Resilience and Infrastructure for DeFi Enterprises (STRIDE), describing it as a structured program for evaluating, monitoring and escalating security across Solana projects.
STRIDE evaluates protocols across eight pillars: program security; governance and access control; oracle and dependency risk; infrastructure security; supply chain security; operational security; monitoring and incident response; and log management and forensics. Protocols are independently assessed against these requirements, with findings published publicly to give users, investors and the broader ecosystem transparency into protocols’ security postures, Asymmetric Research said.
The announcement follows several high-profile incidents. Last week the Drift Protocol lost around $280 million in a social-engineering attack attributed to North Korean-linked actors. In January, $40 million was drained from Solana DeFi platform Step Finance, with reports that AI agents amplified the damage by executing large transfers autonomously.
Alongside STRIDE, the foundation launched the Solana Incident Response Network (SIRN), a consortium of security firms designed for real-time incident response across the Solana ecosystem. Members will share threat intelligence, coordinate responses to active incidents and contribute to the ongoing evolution of the STRIDE framework.
Data from DefiLlama shows malicious actors stole over $168 million from 34 DeFi protocols in Q1 2026, a significant decline from $1.58 billion in Q1 2025. The largest exploit in the quarter was the private key compromise of Step Finance.
The foundation did not single out artificial-intelligence agents in its announcement, but recent breaches demonstrate AI-driven threats are increasingly relevant to crypto protocol security. The STRIDE framework and SIRN aim to improve protocol resilience, transparency and coordinated response to such evolving threats.
