DeFi | Crypto

Aave’s supplied balance has tanked since the Kelp DAO bridge exploit, as users pull funds amid uncertainty over how much of the rsETH-linked shortfall the protocol will ultimately absorb. Aave, the largest decentralized lending protocol, has seen around $15 billion in deposits withdrawn since the Kelp Dao exploit on Saturday.  Total value supplied to Aave fell from $45.8 billion on Saturday to $30.8 billion on Wednesday, according to Aavescan data. The decline followed an attack that drained about 116,500 restaked Ether (rsETH), worth roughly $293 million, from Kelp DAO’s LayerZero-powered rsETH bridge. The exploiter then used part of the stolen funds to borrow on Aave. Read more

Crypto steadied despite rising Iran tensions, but DeFi is reeling from one of the largest exploits of the year.

Bitcoin pulled back after Friday’s surge as traders considered a CME futures gap, a DeFi exploit rattled altcoins and macro pressures weighed on sentiment.

A $292 million exploit at KelpDAO set off a broad retreat across decentralized finance over the weekend, draining roughly $10 billion across the DeFi industry and forcing multiple protocols to freeze markets tied to rsETH. The breach began late Saturday when an attacker drained about 116,500 rsETH from KelpDAO’s cross-chain bridge. The stolen tokens were […] The post DeFi users pull $10 billion out of the market as $292 million exploit sparks bank-run optics appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Developers and traders warn of structural risks as a cross-chain exploit spreads fear and prompts billions to flee DeFi platforms.

The contagion from the Kelp exploit could have been contained, but at the cost of capital efficiency, according to the founder of Curve Finance. The exploit of the Kelp liquid restaking protocol shows how non-isolated lending and integrations in decentralized finance (DeFi) can cause broader ecosystem contagion, according to crypto industry executives and blockchain security firms. Non-isolated lending on DeFi platforms, including earlier versions of the Aave lending protocol, exposes users to risks from all the various tokens used as collateral on the platforms, according to Michael Egorov, founder of the Curve Finance DeFi protocol. Kelp was the target of a cyber attack on Saturday, causing the platform to pause smart contracts for its restaking token (rsETH) while it moved to investigate the attack that left the platform drained of about $293 million. DeFi teams should also vet prospective digital assets to ensure that tokens do not feature single points of failure or attack surfaces before approving token...

A new report finds that agents have taken over the predictable corners of DeFi, but humans still clear the table when trades get complex.

DeFi fared pretty well under the House’s version of the CLARITY Act — but the Senate’s revised draft could throw a spanner in the works.

AllUnity says it is expanding EURAU stablecoin liquidity pools across major DEXs such as Uniswap and Raydium, with trading pairs against USDT and USDT0. AllUnity, a regulated European stablecoin issuer, is expanding its euro-pegged stablecoin, EURAU, across major decentralized exchanges (DEXs). The company announced Thursday that its EURAU stablecoin is entering liquidity pools across major DEXs, including Uniswap, currently the largest decentralized exchange by trading volumes. The rollout includes two EURAU trading pairs, one against Tether USDt (USDT) on Ethereum, and another against USDT0 — an omnichain version of USDT — on the Tempo blockchain. It also includes the EURAU/USDT pair on Solana via the Raydium DEX. Read more

Anthropic's Mythos threat to the crypto industry can trigger hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in sudden, irreversible losses. That is the stark reality facing digital asset markets following Anthropic’s quiet unveiling of Claude Mythos Preview, a vulnerability-seeking AI model the San Francisco startup admits is simply too dangerous to release to the […] The post Anthropic’s secretive Mythos AI can hunt crypto smart contract flaws at machine speed, and billions in DeFi could vanish fast appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Figure Technology is adding auto loans to Democratized Prime and extending Hastra beyond Solana, widening tokenized consumer credit access for DeFi investors. Blockchain-based lender Figure Technology Solutions and Hastra, its onchain credit platform, are adding auto loans to their tokenized credit marketplace, broadening the real-world assets (RWAs) available to decentralized finance (DeFi) investors beyond home equity products. Democratized Prime, a decentralized lending marketplace on Figure Markets, is adding auto finance as its first new asset class as part of its plan to build a marketplace where different types of consumer credit can be issued, traded and funded onchain, according to a Tuesday announcement shared with Cointelegraph. “We’ve been purposefully building toward this,” Michael Tannenbaum, CEO of Figure, said, adding that the platform has originated over $22 billion in onchain loans. Read more

Novozhenov argues that despite lingering governance, security and regulatory hurdles that have shuttered several protocols, DeFi remains resilient.

Claude Mythos Preview identified thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across every major operating system and browser, including in cryptography libraries that DeFi infrastructure depends on.

The Cardano community has officially approved the first tranche of the Orion Fund, a venture-style initiative designed to bridge Bitcoin liquidity into its decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. The governance vote unlocks 50 million ADA from the network's treasury, marking a pivotal shift in how Cardano funds its long-term economic expansion. The approval, which cleared required […] The post Cardano targets Bitcoin liquidity with $80 million fund to meet $3 billion DeFi goal by 2030 appeared first on CryptoSlate.

DeFi yields have collapsed below TradFi rates, forcing investors to face higher smart contract risks for lower returns as regulation and exploits mount.

The Solana Foundation and Web3 security firm Asymmetric Research unveiled a new security initiative called STRIDE, along with a real-time incident-response network. The Solana Foundation on Monday announced a new security auditing framework for Solana-based protocols in addition to an incident-response network, warning that “adversaries are rapidly innovating.” The Solana Foundation, a Swiss organization that supports the adoption and security of Solana, and Web3 security firm Asymmetric Research unveiled the Solana Trust, Resilience and Infrastructure for DeFi Enterprises (STRIDE), stating that it was a “structured program for evaluating, monitoring and escalating security across Solana projects.” The initiative works to evaluate the security of protocols across eight pillars: program security, governance and access control, oracle and dependency risk, infrastructure security, supply chain security, operational security, monitoring and incident response, as well as log management and forensics.  Read more

Security researcher Taylor Monahan listed at least 40 decentralized finance platforms she claims have been infiltrated by North Korean IT workers at some stage of their lives. North Korean IT workers have been embedding themselves in crypto companies and decentralized finance projects for at least seven years, according to a cybersecurity analyst. “Lots of DPRK IT workers built the protocols you know and love, all the way back to DeFi summer,” said MetaMask developer and security researcher Taylor Monahan on Sunday.  Monahan claimed that over 40 DeFi platforms, some being well-known names, have had North Korean IT workers working on their protocols. Read more

Wall Street spent the first quarter of 2026 systematically narrowing DeFi's claim to the future of finance. In January, ICE announced NYSE was building a tokenized securities platform with 24/7 operations, instant settlement, dollar-based order sizing, and stablecoin funding, with BNY and Citi providing tokenized deposits for clearinghouse funding outside normal banking hours. In February, […] The post As Wall Street moves on-chain, DeFi faces a $330 billion trust test it can’t dodge appeared first on CryptoSlate.

January saw the largest attack against a DeFi protocol of the quarter, the $40 million private key compromise of portfolio management platform Step Finance. Crypto hackers stole over $168.6 million in cryptocurrency from 34 decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols in the first quarter of 2026, falling significantly from the same period last year, according to data from DefiLlama.  The $40 million private key compromise of Step Finance in January was the largest exploit of the quarter, the data shows, followed by a smart contract manipulation that drained $26.4 million in ether (ETH) from Truebit on Jan. 8. The third-largest was a private key compromise targeting stablecoin issuer Resolv Labs on March 21. The quarterly figure is low given that the industry saw $1.58 billion stolen in the first quarter of 2025, with the bulk coming from the $1.4 billion Bybit exploit. However, experts warn that crypto hacks aren’t tied to specific periods within a year. Read more

DeFi prioritizes gas efficiency over market resilience. Simplified financial logic fails under volatility due to computational constraints. Opinion by: João Garcia, DevReal lead at Cartesi. Decentralized finance presents itself as a transparent alternative to Wall Street. Yet, what it has largely reconstructed is a simplified version of finance, engineered less around market resilience than around the constraints of gas fees. That trade-off, once treated as a technical footnote, is increasingly shaping the limits of what DeFi can become. So long as computational minimalism remains the overriding priority, financial robustness will remain secondary, and periods of market stress will continue to expose that imbalance. DeFi has rebuilt the familiar architecture of finance, including exchanges, lending markets, derivatives and stablecoins. However, the way these systems function reveals how tightly they are bound by their execution environments. Read more