We build DeFi protocols.

DeFi development is the engineering of permissionless financial primitives — lending, borrowing, trading, staking, yield and derivatives — as composable on-chain protocols where the protocol itself is the counterparty. Real builds include core contracts, oracle integration, liquidation engines, parameter governance, liquidity bootstrapping and the monitoring plus incident response that keeps protocols solvent after launch.

Cost is driven mostly by protocol category, oracle dependence, chain choice, governance design, security-review depth and launch liquidity strategy — the client UI is a small slice of the total. A yield aggregator is lighter than a lending market, which is lighter than a perpetuals venue or a cross-chain restaking protocol.

For most protocols, two independent third-party audits plus a strong bug bounty is the appropriate bar; for the most security-critical components — liquidation logic, oracle handling, core accounting — formal verification is increasingly standard. The real question is whether your security posture matches the TVL the protocol will hold, not whether audits alone are theoretically sufficient.

Ethereum mainnet for security, tooling and TVL; Arbitrum, Optimism or Base for cheaper EVM-compatible execution; Solana for throughput-sensitive products; Cosmos app-chains or custom rollups when sovereign infrastructure genuinely helps. The choice depends on where your users already hold assets and how much MEV and bridge-risk complexity you can operationally absorb.

Core smart contracts, oracle integration with failover, a liquidation engine, risk-parameter governance, keeper infrastructure, monitoring and alerts, and client-facing surfaces including a web dApp and subgraph. Two independent third-party audits and formal verification on critical components are standard; the liquidity itself and token-distribution design sit outside the engineering scope.

Every oracle interaction carries explicit deviation checks, heartbeat monitoring and circuit breakers — never just a raw call to a price feed. Chainlink is the default, Pyth covers low-latency assets, API3 covers first-party data, with custom on-chain TWAP as a fallback. Protocols halt rather than transact when oracles deviate beyond threshold — oracle failure is the single most common DeFi exploit vector.

Yes — Rust on Solana, Move on Aptos and Sui, Solidity on EVM, CosmWasm on Cosmos. The financial mechanics translate across chains; the tooling, MEV environment and operational cadence differ. The right choice depends on target audience and product category, not team familiarity.

Liquidation logic gets tested against adversarial keeper behavior and simulated gas spikes, not just happy-path testnet conditions. Gas spikes during volatile markets can make liquidations unprofitable for keepers, leaving bad debt on the books — priority ordering, partial liquidations and fail-safe auto-deleveraging are designed in from the start, not patched in after a bad day.

Protocols holding material stablecoin exposure need oracle caps, depeg detection and automatic halts built in — treating any stablecoin as a hard peg is how protocols end up insolvent when the peg breaks. USDC, USDT and DAI have all depegged under specific market conditions; the design has to assume it happens again.

On-chain earns its place wherever trustlessness, composability or verifiable settlement are the point. Lending, AMMs, staking and anything where users need to verify the rules themselves belong there. Parts of a product that are purely operational — dashboards, notifications, analytics — usually sit off-chain where they are cheaper and faster to iterate. Most strong protocols are a mix, and getting that split right early is one of the higher-leverage decisions in the build. We map it with you before any contract is written.