I recently read that Step Finance – a popular DeFi aggregation platform on Solana – has officially shut down completely. The reason was a hack that resulted in approximately $30 million being withdrawn from the system at the end of January. But what’s interesting here isn’t just that a project has ceased operations; it reflects a bigger issue in DeFi that many people still haven’t recognized.

What’s different this time compared to previous DeFi incidents? Usually, when hearing about a hack, people immediately think of smart contract vulnerabilities—that is, bugs in the code of the smart contract. But this isn’t the case with Step Finance. According to information, the vulnerability wasn’t in the smart contract itself or how it was coded, but on the off-chain side—specifically, the devices of the project management team being compromised. When attackers gain control of these devices, they can access private keys or interfere with transaction approval processes. As a result, nearly 262,000 SOL were withdrawn, and the STEP token plummeted over 80% in a short period.

This is the key point: even if the smart contract is thoroughly audited and the code is clean, risks can still come from human factors and how they manage the system. Understanding what a smart contract is is only a small part of the picture. Managing private keys, internal approval processes, device control—these are just as important.

By the way, Step Finance was once a pretty useful tool for Solana users to track their DeFi portfolios. Now that it’s gone, it creates a certain gap. However, SOL remains relatively stable, indicating that the market is differentiating between the risk of a single protocol and the long-term prospects of the blockchain.

But looking at the bigger picture, the situation is even more concerning. According to data from PeckShield, total crypto-related losses in 2025 have exceeded $4.04 billion—up nearly 34% from the previous year. Of that, $2.67 billion came from hacks, and $1.37 billion from scams, which ( increased by 64%. Just in February alone, there was a disaster with a $1.51 billion attack on a major exchange. Over 200 hacking incidents have been recorded.

What’s notable is that the trend is changing. Instead of just exploiting technical vulnerabilities, attacks are increasingly targeting people—social engineering, device control, targeting large organizations or individuals holding significant assets. This significantly raises the average damage per hack.

In comparison, smart contracts remain a part of security, but DeFi now needs to expand its safety standards beyond just code. Internal governance, key management, transaction approval processes—all need to be optimized. As institutional capital pays more attention to digital assets, incidents like these raise the question: is DeFi infrastructure ready to handle operational risks at scale?

Step Finance may just be one project within the ecosystem, but it reminds us that risks in DeFi aren’t only on the blockchain. They lie in how people manage, operate, and protect what’s behind the system. That’s the real challenge the industry needs to address.