Risk & security research for
on-chain credit
Institutional-grade analysis at the intersection of DeFi risk, security, and methodology:
post-mortems, thematic reports, and briefings from the Philidor risk desk.
Who Eats the First Loss
A source-qualified review of DeFi first-loss events: where the waterfall operated, where it was never tested, and what a senior claim should disclose.
How DeFi Protocols Fail, Three Findings from an Honest Backtest
Bigger DeFi protocols get hacked more often, but they lose far less than their size suggests, and most of the money disappears in a handful of catastrophic drains. Three findings from seven years of public DeFi history.
The Expensive Model That Did Not Beat Size
We split DeFi failure risk into four mechanism families and fit hazard and severity models under a pre-registered standard, trying to beat a one-variable champion, protocol size. Mostly we lost, and the loss is the result. What passed reshapes expected loss: when protocols fail, the loss grows far more slowly than the protocol. This is the lab report, with the same-day adversarial corrections attached.
The Recursion Map, Concentration Is the Input, Not the Risk
On-chain credit is concentrated, and everyone can see it. We measure what sits underneath. What is vault collateral actually made of once each layer is unwrapped, and do the loans flagged as liquidatable actually get closed out? About a quarter of traced backing turns out to be wrapped, staked or synthetic, and some flagged debt can never clear at all. Every figure is stamped to an endpoint, snapshot, and formula.
Four Ways a Stablecoin Breaks, Reflexivity, Reserves, Redemption, and Contagion
Eleven major depegs since 2016, four of them in 2025, sorted into four failure modes. What the record shows about how pegs actually break, which modes regulation has closed, and how a peg should be scored as a live input.