Hacken: Crypto Institutions No Longer Rely Solely on Audits, Security Assessment Shifts to Continuous Monitoring and Operational Resilience

BlockBeats News, July 20th, Blockchain security company Hacken released a report stating that crypto institutions are reevaluating project security standards. Traditional smart contract audits and operational history are no longer sufficient as a trust basis. Investors are now focusing on continuous monitoring, signature permission management, and incident response capability.

According to the Hacken "Q2 2026 Security & Compliance Report," out of the 1427 projects tracked, only 9% of projects have deployed third-party continuous monitoring mechanisms. Only 4% of projects have both monitoring, bug bounty programs, and security audits.

The report shows that out of the approximately $7.64 billion in crypto asset losses in Q2 2026, 88.3% came from private key leaks, signature permissions, and infrastructure security issues, rather than smart contract vulnerabilities.

Hacken stated that institutional investors are gradually incorporating considerations such as signer changes, staked asset support, third-party dependencies, incident response capabilities, and assessments of audit scope and timeliness into their due diligence.

The report pointed out that the 14 projects attacked in the second quarter had all undergone audits before, but most of the losses came from areas beyond the traditional audit coverage, including signature devices, cross-chain bridge validation nodes, backend infrastructure, administrator keys, and old contracts still in operation.

Hacken mentioned that as institutional funds enter the crypto market, projects lacking continuous security validation may face a higher risk premium, fewer investment opportunities, and difficulties in obtaining insurance and partner support. Federico Bagiotti, Head of Risk Management at Abraxas Capital, stated that compared to a project's potential, whether the security level matches the scale of funding has become a crucial criterion for institutional investment decisions.