The Solana Foundation has launched Stride, a security evaluation program, and the Solana Incident Response Network (SIRN) to strengthen DeFi protocols. The initiatives come days after a $270 million Drift Protocol exploit by a North Korean state-affiliated group exposed weaknesses in human-targeted social engineering and compromised contributor devices.
To combat this, Stride assesses DeFi protocols against eight security pillars, with results published publicly. Protocols with over $10 million TVL receive operational security and threat monitoring, while those with over $100 million TVL get formal verification, a method that guarantees correctness.
The Solana Foundation also introduced SIRN, a membership-based group of security firms and researchers focused on real-time crisis response. However, experts say these programs don’t transfer responsibility to protocols themselves, as the Drift postmortem revealed that individual contributor devices were compromised.
The foundation emphasizes its push for “agentic payments,” with over 15M AI-driven transactions and growing adoption of x402 micropayments.
Source: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/04/07/solana-foundation-unveils-security-overhaul-days-after-usd270-million-drift-exploit