Alert System

Steakhouse Financial is responsible for curating and advising billions of dollars on-chain, and has established a solid framework to automate incident response and monitoring.

To support our ongoing assessment of risks, we have implemented a wide range of alerts within our monitoring system. The frequency of these alerts is determined by the severity of the underlying risk. Our incident response protocols range from human oversight and breach acknowledgment to fully automated kill switches that transfer funds to secure vaults.

Types of Alerts

We continuously develop new alerts as part of our ongoing evaluation of protocol integrations and collateral assets. During the due diligence process, we identify key risk vectors associated with each asset and configure a corresponding set of customized alerting parameters.

These alerts differ in type, source, and the nature of the risks they are designed to surface.

  1. Price

Detect abnormal price behaviour, including manipulation or depegging that could disrupt market conditions or create unfair borrowing and lending dynamics.

Source: On-chain vault pricing logic, smart contract price functions, oracle feeds, and external price providers (both on-chain and off-chain via API calls)

Examples:

  • Instant price divergence between oracles and DEX market prices

  • Price manipulation through low liquidity pairs

  • Sudden depegging of correlated assets

  1. On-Chain Activity

Identify transaction-level behavior indicative of risk, abuse, or malfunction

Source: Blockchain event listeners, value or number of transactions within specific timeframe, through both RPC and Hypernative integration

Examples:

  • Unusual smart contract interactions

  • Deployment of potentially malicious contracts by unknown wallets

  • Sudden spikes in borrowing activity tied to a specific collateral type

  • High-frequency collateral deposits or withdrawals suggesting automated strategies or exploit attempts

  1. Governance (Msigs Governance)

Monitor any high-impact changes to the economic parameters of collateral or loan assets, including shifts in risk settings or significant reserve value transfers

Source: Multisig activity, DAO proposal, governance forum discussions

Examples:

  • Large reserve movements by the issuer (withdrawing a significant percentage of reserves within a short timeframe)

  • Enabling or disabling withdrawals from a vault used as collateral

  • Changing the underlying asset backing a reserve

  • Disabling pegging mechanisms or modifying exchange rate parameters

  1. Issuer Quality and Trust

Purpose: Assess the issuer’s ability to manage its protocol, sustain as a business and uphold a trustworthy reputation

Source: Proof of reserves, financial disclosures, smart contract audits, governance proposals, social media activity, community sentiment

Examples:

  • Changes in proof of reserves

  • Decline in governance activity, missed roadmap and loss of community trust

  • Quality of the relationship with the issuer

Alert Frequency

The alerting cadence is defined by the nature and criticality of the event:

  1. Instantaneous Block-Level Alerts

Triggered as soon as an on-chain event occurs (completed transaction, price oracle update, vault activity, governance action).

Instantly processed at block confirmation

  1. Periodic Alerts

Polled checks every few minutes (not exceeding 1 hour). Critical alerts always default to real-time block-based triggers. Aggregated signals supplement these for contextual decisions.

Used for less volatile indicators that benefit from aggregation

Calibrated Incident Response

The response framework is designed to scale with the severity of risk, ensuring that appropriate action is taken at every level of alert.

For low-risk situations, the response involves a human review to assess the potential future consequences of the alert, even if there has been no economic impact at this stage. Risk analysts annotate and investigate the event, evaluate its relevance, and discuss it with the broader team.

For medium-level risk, the automated system initiates preventive containment. This involves applying soft mechanisms such as halting new supply in specific vaults or markets, adjusting risk parameters, or temporarily freezing allocation functions until further assessment. These actions aim to prevent escalation without disrupting the entire protocol or sending premature signals. The freeze remains in place until clear signs of improvement justify lifting the measures or escalating to a higher level of intervention.

High-risk alerts trigger the most aggressive response, possibly leading to a hard kill switch. This includes forcefully withdrawing liquidity, processing liquidations, migrating funds to secure markets, or disabling smart contract interactions. Such events can escalate to a critical response environment where a dedicated war room is activated and risk teams, developers and managers coordinate to resolve the incident.

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