The "Audited" Badge Is Lying to You

Two exploits — Kelp DAO ($292M) and Drift ($285M) — drained $760 million from DeFi in early 2026 without breaking a single smart contract. Both protocols had clean audit reports. This piece argues that audits are a point-in-time opinion, not a security guarantee, and that formal verification — which produces mathematical proof that code cannot behave unexpectedly — is the only methodology that meets the demands of an autonomous, agent-driven DeFi economy.