Solana Rolls Out Tools to Fend Off Blockchain Security Threats

The Solana Foundation has introduced a set of measures to bolster its ecosystem security.

The new initiatives, announced Monday (April 6), are being led by security firm Asymmetric Research with funding from Solana.

“Solana Foundation has a long history of dedicating resources to ensure that security services and tools are available to the ecosystem, and today’s announcement further strengthens that commitment,” the company said on its blog.

The foundation noted that many of the protocols on its blockchain, some of them managing billions in value, have spent years reinforcing their security. In the meantime, “adversaries are rapidly innovating,” the blog post added.

To counter this, Solana is introducing new initiatives like STRIDE (Solana Trust, Resilience and Infrastructure for DeFi Enterprises), designed to monitor and evaluate security in Solana projects. Asymmetric will independently evaluate projects using its own security framework, the blog post said, with evaluation results publicly available to users and investors.

As an incentive, protocols with more than $10 million in total locked value (TVL) that pass the evaluation will get ongoing operations security support and active threat monitoring, funded by Solana. Protocols with upwards of $100 million in TVL will get the opportunity for additional formal verification tools for smart contracts.

Also announced was the Solana Incident Response Network (SIRN), aimed at responding to security incidents as they happen.

“SIRN is a dedicated, membership-based network of security firms and researchers focused on protecting the Solana ecosystem,” the blog post said, adding that this is “available to all Solana protocols, but prioritized based on TVL.”

The announcement comes days after reports that Solana-based decentralized cryptocurrency exchange Drift had suffered an exploit that resulted in theft of $285 million in digital assets. A report by Bloomberg News said that the amount of cryptocurrencies involved, as calculated by blockchain data analysts, could make this one of the largest hacks in crypto’s history.

In related news, PYMNTS wrote last week about Chainalysis‘ launch of blockchain intelligence agents designed for fraud prevention.

This offering indicates that the industry’s response to AI-driven crypto fraud and bot attacks is one that must ultimately be symmetrical, that report said.

“Agentic blockchain defenses are not innovation for efficiency’s sake. They are defensive escalation,” PYMNTS wrote. “If bad actors can use artificial intelligence to accelerate activity, enforcement and compliance must use AI to compress detection and response times, meaning tasks that once took days should now take minutes, and investigations that required specialists must be executable by broader teams.”