British Virgin Islands, BVI, Oct. 06, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Firelight, an onchain cover-enablement protocol for DeFi, today announced that its protection is live, starting with Sentora‘s USD Protected Vault and Protected RWA Vaults. Until now, the most common practice has been for each depositor to research and buy protection on their own, which defeats the purpose of a vault, where the complexity of navigating risk management and strategies is abstracted away. A handful of vault-level options have emerged, but in most of them the party deciding a claim is the same party that has to pay it, and the capital behind a payout sits in the same assets that can fall in the event that triggered it. Firelight separates the two. Five independent firms validate every cover event against published criteria, and the capital backing cover sits outside the covered protocols.
Vaults are where onchain capital is heading. Curated vault assets have grown 39% over the past year and users have deposited more than $10 billion into Morpho in the last two years, around $1 billion of it through exchanges and fintechs. Apollo, which manages close to $940 billion, agreed to acquire up to 9% of Morpho’s governance token supply. However, available protection over these activities has been left behind. Oracle attacks on lending protocols have nearly tripled this year, while the capital behind onchain cover amounts to just 0.14% of the $88.3 billion locked in DeFi.
“As more capital moves onchain, protection needs to be as transparent and scalable as the markets it supports,” said Connor Sullivan, Chief Strategy Officer at Firelight. “Firelight is built for that future. The terms are public and programmatic, the capital can be verified onchain and every exploit event is validated by independent firms with no stake in the outcome. We see this as the foundation for DeFi’s next phase of growth.”
Firelight has enabled protection on Sentora’s USD Protected Vault and Protected RWA Vaults. Sentora is the largest vault curator in DeFi, with $2.8 billion in aggregate vault TVL across more than 300 strategies.The cover on these vaults enables protection against defined technical and economic events, such as oracle manipulation, an attack type behind this year’s rise in lending exploits, subject to pre-specified coverage limits.
Veda and Upshift, both leading vault infrastructure providers, integrate Firelight at the infrastructure layer, so operators building on them can elect protection enablement for their own vaults and depositors inherit it.
“Until now, protection has been missing from the infrastructure behind DeFi earn products,” said Lucas Outumuro, VP of Institutional DeFi Sentora. “Yield alone is no longer enough. Users deserve an extra layer of protection. We believe this should be the industry standard, and we are proud to be leading the way.”
Firelight registers each cover market’s terms onchain before cover is enabled, including scope, price and capacity, so what is protected is always visible in advance rather than argued over after a loss. Eligible events are named, and include smart contract exploits, oracle failures, governance exploits, bad debt and depegs from mechanism failure, and redemption failures. When an incident occurs, ZeroShadow, Firelight’s designated security partner, publishes an exploit report, and the Firelight Risk Consortium, an independent panel made up of Hypernative, Native, Credora, GFX Labs and Cyfrin, validates the occurrence of the event against those published criteria and confirms the existence of loss before payouts follow. The capital behind the Protocol’s programmatic cover engine is achieved by participants staking to the Protocol. Stakers earn a proportionate share of the Protocol’s emissions, generated in part by the fees operators pay for the enabled cover. Firelight is audited by OpenZeppelin and runs a public bug bounty through Immunefi. The protocol is built on Flare Network, whose FAssets infrastructure brings XRP onchain as the collateral backing cover, and is incubated by Sentora. Firelight recently raised $8 million led by Gumi Cryptos Capital with participation from Tribe Capital and Maven 11.
About Firelight
Firelight is a decentralized protection layer for digital assets. Built on the Flare Network and incubated by Sentora, Firelight enables a capital-backed market for DeFi cover, registering coverage terms onchain, holding capital in non-custodial vaults and validating every cover event through an independent Risk Consortium. Protocols and vault operators purchase protection while stakers earn fees for backing it.
About Sentora
Sentora is an institutional DeFi platform combining strategy design, risk management and cover in one system, enabling capital to be deployed at scale across DeFi markets. Formed in 2025 from the merger of IntoTheBlock and Trident Digital, Sentora curates vaults for leading protocols and institutions, applying more than 1,000 risk models across 300 monitored strategies.
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