Catenaa, Thursday, February 26, 2026-The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) released its 2026 Smart Contract Top 10, a framework highlighting the most common causes of smart contract failures based on real-world incidents from 2025 and prior years.
The report, led by CredShields with research from SolidityScan and Web3HackHub, focuses on structural vulnerabilities rather than theoretical coding flaws. It identifies access control weaknesses, business logic errors, price oracle manipulation, flash loan attacks, and insufficient input validation as the highest-ranked risks.
Analysts noted that many losses in 2025 were not due to broken cryptography but misconfigured governance permissions, exposed admin keys, fragile oracle integrations, and weak upgrade controls.
In some cases, contracts performed as designed but failed under stressed economic assumptions, allowing attackers to extract millions through cross-chain timing exploits or oracle manipulation.
OWASP emphasized that passing an audit does not guarantee resilience.
The framework aims to shift security upstream, encouraging developers to model risks before capital is exposed and reinforcing that “audited” does not automatically mean “secure.”
The report also highlights operational and governance failures, including multisig compromise, rushed proposals, and supply chain vulnerabilities, underscoring that smart contract security is only one layer of overall crypto risk.
An expanded “Alternate Top 15 Web3 Attack Vectors” provides further guidance for DeFi protocols, tokenized assets, and interconnected on-chain systems.
OWASP’s Smart Contract Security Project is part of the nonprofit’s broader mission to improve software security globally.
CredShields supports the initiative through automated analysis, exploit intelligence, and structured risk assessments for blockchain enterprises.
The full OWASP Smart Contract Top 10 2026 framework, methodology, and supporting data are available on the OWASP Smart Contract Security Project page.
