Fixed-Income DeFi Costs: FiduWork ERC-4626 Architecture

Frequently Asked Questions

01.How much does a fixed-income DeFi platform cost to build in 2026?

A production fixed-income DeFi platform built on ERC-4626 vaults typically ranges from 180,000 to 450,000 US dollars depending on scope. The largest single line is the security audit, where top-tier firms charge around 25,000 dollars per engineer-week and a mid-size DeFi primitive of roughly 2,500 lines runs 200,000 to 300,000 dollars across initial review and remediation. Smart contract development, oracle and rate-engine logic, frontend, and infrastructure make up the remainder. Treat every figure here as a market research range pending a scoped quote.

02.Should a team build a fixed-income DeFi platform from scratch or buy a white-label vault?

Most teams launching a first fixed-income product reach production faster by forking an audited ERC-4626 base such as the OpenZeppelin implementation and customizing the rate engine, rather than writing share accounting from zero. A white-label or fork-and-extend path ships in roughly eight to fourteen weeks, while a full custom build of vault, rate engine, and risk layer runs four to seven months and a larger budget. A full custom build only pays back when the rate or risk logic is the core differentiator.

03.What is the ERC-4626 inflation attack and why does it affect cost?

The ERC-4626 inflation attack, also called the donation or first-depositor attack, lets an attacker who is the first depositor mint one share, then directly transfer a large asset amount into the vault so a later depositor rounds down to zero shares and loses funds. Because share math rounds in favor of the vault, this is a real standard-level risk. Mitigating it with virtual shares or a dead-share deposit adds audit and testing scope, which is why a thorough vault audit costs more than a generic token review.