Investigating DeFi hacks with ‘Code is Law’ co-director James Craig and Wildcat Finance co-founder Laurence Day
In the high-stakes arena of decentralized finance, where innovation races ahead of regulation, the mantra ‘code is law’ is both a founding principle and a stark vulnerability. I sat down with James Craig, co-director of the provocative documentary ‘Code is Law’, and Laurence Day, co-founder of the innovative lending protocol Wildcat Finance, to peel back the layers on what happens when that code fails spectacularly.Their conversations aren't just post-mortems of multi-million dollar exploits; they're urgent dialogues about the soul of a financial system built on transparent, yet fallible, smart contracts. Craig, with his filmmaker's eye for narrative, frames these hacks not as mere technical failures but as profound philosophical stress tests.He argues that each major breach—from the infamous DAO hack that nearly broke Ethereum to the more recent, sophisticated attacks on cross-chain bridges—forces the community to confront a painful question: do we truly believe in immutability, or do we intervene? The tension between ideological purity and pragmatic security, he observes, is the defining drama of DeFi's adolescence. Laurence Day brings the gritty, on-the-ground perspective of a builder who has to operate within this turbulent reality.For Wildcat Finance, security isn't an abstract concept; it's a daily siege. Day walked me through the meticulous, often paranoid, process of protocol development—from multi-layered audits and bug bounty programs that rival nation-state payouts, to the implementation of circuit-breaker mechanisms and time-locked upgrades.He describes a landscape where attackers are increasingly professional, employing flash loan attacks and price oracle manipulations with surgical precision, turning DeFi's composability, its greatest strength, into its most exploitable weakness. The consequences of these hacks ripple far beyond lost funds.They erode the fragile trust essential for mainstream adoption, attract the heavy gaze of global regulators keen to impose traditional financial frameworks, and create a chilling effect on innovation as developers spend more resources on defense than on groundbreaking new features. Yet, both Craig and Day see a path forward through this baptism by fire.They point to the rapid evolution of security-focused layers like decentralized insurance protocols, formal verification tools that mathematically prove code correctness, and a growing culture of responsible disclosure. The future they envision isn't one without risk, but one where the ecosystem's immune system—its collective intelligence, its open-source scrutiny, and its economic incentives for white-hats—matures to match the sophistication of its adversaries. This isn't just a story about hackers and victims; it's the messy, exhilarating process of building a new financial frontier in real-time, where every line of code carries both a promise and a peril.
#DeFi hacks
#Code is Law
#Wildcat Finance
#security exploits
#protocol vulnerabilities
#featured
