Here's a number worth sitting with: over $3.8 billion was lost to smart contract exploits and blockchain hacks in 2022 alone. Not because the teams behind those products were incompetent. Because smart contract code is unforgiving in a way that most software simply isn't — and a lot of CTOs find that out the hard way, after the fact. In traditional software, a bug ships, someone notices, you patch it, you move on. Smart contracts don't work like that. Once a contract is deployed on a public blockchain, it's live, it's immutable, and if there's a vulnerability in it, anyone in the world can find it and exploit it at any time. There's no rolling back a transaction that drained your liquidity pool. There's no hotfix that recovers funds that have already moved. This is why any serious blockchain development company will tell you that a security audit isn't a nice-to-have you schedule when the budget allows — it's a fundamental part of shipping.…