The Vision Behind Web3SOC
2026 accelerates the digital economy beyond the standards used to evaluate it.
Decentralized finance now supports institutional scale activity, with capital, infrastructure, and talent flowing through onchain systems in production. Yet the frameworks used to assess governance, security, financial resilience, and regulatory readiness remain fragmented and inconsistent.
Institutional pathways into DeFi have expanded through custody, products, and infrastructure. What has not kept pace are the methodologies used to evaluate organizational risk and maturity. Institutions continue to repurpose traditional due diligence processes, or reconstruct them from scratch to fit DeFi despite structural differences. Organizations operate without clear visibility into how their practices are interpreted by external stakeholders.
The result is systemic friction. Risk is assessed in isolation. Comparability remains limited. Alignment between builders and evaluators develops more slowly than the market itself.
Web3SOC was created to address this gap.
Developed in collaboration with leaders across DeFi, blockchain infrastructure, security, and institutional finance including Uniswap Labs, Coinbase, Morpho, Maple Finance, Kiln, Steakhouse Financial, L1D, Secureum, Ethena, Euler and Lido, Web3SOC establishes a shared framework for assessing organizational maturity and long term institutional readiness in decentralized finance.
What follows breaks down the Web3SOC framework, its classification system, and how it brings structure, clarity, and consistency to institutional DeFi due diligence.
Web3SOC: The Institutional Due Diligence Standard for DeFi
Web3SOC is the institutional maturity framework designed to evaluate DeFi organizations across four core domains. It provides a common language for institutions and organizations to assess readiness without abstracting away the realities of decentralized systems.
Rather than relying on bespoke, protocol-by-protocol reviews, Web3SOC introduces a consistent methodology that makes institutional expectations explicit and comparable. This standardization paves the way for institutional-grade DeFi by bridging the DeFi-TradFi diligence gap.
Who Web3SOC Is For
For Institutions
Web3SOC provides a structured approach to evaluating the investment suitability of DeFi organizations. By assessing onchain governance risk, operational controls, security posture, financial resilience, and regulatory considerations in parallel, institutions can conduct diligence with rigor comparable to traditional finance, without rebuilding internal frameworks from scratch.
For DeFi Organizations
Web3SOC functions as a readiness and self-assessment framework. It allows organizations to understand how institutional stakeholders evaluate maturity, identify gaps, and prioritize improvements required for long-term institutional engagement.
Key Evaluation Areas
Web3SOC evaluates organizations across four fundamental maturity domains:
- Operational
- Governance structures, organizational design, decision-making processes, change management, and key custody practices that underpin day-to-day stability.
- Financial
- Economic design, capital resilience, treasury management, and exposure to counterparty and systemic risk.
- Security
- Protocol security, infrastructure resilience, incident response capability, and security history beyond point-in-time audits.
- Regulatory
- Compliance posture, disclosures, and jurisdictional considerations relevant to institutional participation.
Together, these domains provide a holistic view of institutional DeFi readiness.
How the assessment is represented
Web3SOC produces a detailed scorecard and maturity classification as part of the assessment process. That output is designed for decision-making and benchmarking, not marketing.
Detailed scoring is shared privately with the assessed organization and can be shared with institutional stakeholders as part of diligence workflows.
Publicly, Web3SOC is represented through certification status. This keeps the public signal clear while ensuring the underlying work remains evidence-driven and useful in real diligence settings.
Certification statuses
Organizations can publicly share one of the following statuses:
- Web3SOC Certification In Progress
- Web3SOC Certified
These badges can be used on websites, investor materials, and announcements as a straightforward indication of participation and completion.
What certification means
Web3SOC certification indicates that an organization has completed a Web3SOC assessment and met the certification threshold based on evidence reviewed during the engagement.
How Web3SOC Is Used
For Institutions
Web3SOC can be integrated into existing due diligence and risk evaluation workflows to assess DeFi risk exposure with clarity, structure, and confidence.
Get in touch to learn how Web3SOC can support your evaluation process.
For Organizations
Organizations can complete a self-assessment or work with Cantina to understand their current standing, and what is required to earn institutional trust.
Get the certification to benchmark your institutional readiness.
A Shared Standard for the Next Phase of DeFi
Institutional participation in DeFi is no longer constrained by access. The next phase of growth will be defined by assurance, consistent evaluation, evidence-based risk assessment, and shared expectations across the industry.
Web3SOC establishes the foundation for the transition to institutional-grade DeFi.