Gas Audit Flags 12-18% Cost Inefficiency in Venus Core Pool's $1.35B DeFi Protocol

A gas-efficiency audit of Venus Core Pool, a decentralized lending and borrowing protocol with approximately $1.35 billion in total value locked, was published on September 26, 2026, by a senior DeFi smart-contract auditor. The review identified eight categories of gas-intensive coding patterns, including redundant storage reads, unbounded loops, and unnecessary SafeMath usage in Solidity 0.8+, collectively inflating transaction costs by an estimated 12–18% above optimal. The most critical finding involves unbounded loops in the enterMarkets() and exitMarkets() functions, which could allow attackers to trigger a denial-of-service condition by exhausting the block gas limit. Auditors also flagged a front-running risk, where high transaction costs could incentivize validators to prioritize cheaper competing calls, potentially enabling sandwich attacks on interest-rate updates. At current transaction volumes, the cumulative gas inefficiencies are estimated to cost protocol users approximately $2–4 million in excess fees annually.