Sebastian Banescu
Dr. Sebastian Banescu is the founder of Adevar Labs, a security firm dedicated to hardening the Web3 ecosystem. With over 15 years in digital security and 7 years specifically in blockchain, his experience spans from securing industrial systems at BMW, Philips, and Deloitte to conducting over 100 smart contract audits since 2018. A former researcher with a PhD from TU Munich and over 1,200 citations on Google Scholar, Sebastian Banescu specializes in the intersection of formal verification and real-world exploit analysis. He notably founded the first regulated insurance company for smart contract risks, pioneering the use of actuarial standards in DeFi.
Session
Most Web3 incidents aren’t “one bug, one drain” anymore. Attackers increasingly chain weaknesses across layers such as legacy contracts, subtle numerical edge cases, protocol/bridge exit paths, and off-chain vendor exposure, into an exploit path that ends in irreversible loss. In this talk we'll take a look at some high-signal incidents from 2025 and discuss how to break attack chains before they reach funds. Lessons learned will include practical strategies that projects may adopt to build defense-in-depth that breaks attack chains.