Trust the Code or Trust Your Luck: The Real Price of Skipping Smart Contract Due Diligence in DeFi
The gap between traders who rigorously vet DeFi protocols and those who deploy capital on intuition alone has never been wider — or more consequential. Across the United States, retail participants continue to lose significant sums to vulnerabilities that professional-grade code reviews would have flagged in advance. A practical framework for assessing protocol risk exists, and it does not require a six-figure security budget.