MakerDAO · 1290

Andre Cronje: DeFi no longer exists, only on-chain finance is left

Comparing news, Andre Cronje, founder of the DeFi platform Flying Tulip and founder of Fantom Network, said that most DeFi protocols are no longer truly decentralized, and only a few niche sectors can still be called DeFi. In his opinion, DeFi has evolved into “on-chain finance” or “open finance.” He pointed out that true DeFi should have characteristics such as decentralization, immutability, and no intermediaries. Currently, intermediaries for most agreements have become companies and assume traditional financial institution functions such as decision makers and risk committees. Cronje said that doesn't mean real DeFi doesn't exist anymore, and some protocols are still innovating. According to DeFilLama data, the total hedging value of DeFi has dropped by more than half in the past 10 months from $167 billion in early October 2025 to $75 billion when the original article was published. The European Central Bank (ECB) analyzed Aave, MakerDAO, Ampleforth, and Uniswap in a working paper published in March and found that based on November 2022 and May 2023 position snapshots, the 100 addresses with the highest governance token holdings in the above agreement all control more than 80% of the token supply. The ECB therefore questioned the extent of decentralization of the DAO in question and whether it should continue to be considered a “fully decentralized” service not subject to the Crypto Asset Market Regulation Act (MiCA). This article is sponsored by GENG, Build Your Fortune on GENG (https://geng.one)

9d agoburnking

179% during the year! RWA has skyrocketed, are institutions really entering the market?

Source: Token Dispatch Author: Vaidik Mandloi Compiled and edited by: BitPushNews Real World Asset (RWA) tokenization has soared 179% this year. Hyperliquid's trading volume on stocks and commodities now surpasses even crypto tokens. Everyone seems to have finally come to the conclusion: traditional finance (TradFi) is finally about to fully enter the chain. But when you go back to the roots and find out who is actually buying these RWAs, you'll find that this isn't a grand story of institutions entering the market at all — because most of the money actually comes from within the crypto industry. The treasury of major agreements and DAOs is frantically hoarding stocks and converting their reserves into tokenized US debt. This article will explore in depth: why this RWA spree looks more like a “dollarization” event of cryptocurrencies themselves than an institutional downgrade attack; and what it actually means when crypto protocols themselves become the biggest buyers of these tokenized US bonds. Who is actually trading RWA? Let me take you back to a few years ago: if you follow DeFi in 2020 and 2021, you'll see simply outrageous returns. Lending pools attract dollar deposits with an annualized yield of 15% to 20%, sometimes as high as 40%. Tens of billions of dollars are pouring in, yet almost no one is questioning where this money actually came from. Because these benefits come from token emissions — the agreement mints its own governance token, distributes it as a “reward” to depositors, and counts this subsidy as revenue. This is the ultimate trick to attract investors and increase TVL (total hedged value), but it only works on one condition: the token price must continue to rise. Later, when the market crashed and governance tokens plummeted by 80%-90%, the real organic yield of DeFi was actually only 2%-3%. This is even less than the yield on US short-term treasury bonds, and the risk is much higher. This revealed the harsh truth: the crypto world took years to build a financial system that simply couldn't generate competitive returns from its own economic activity. Because those benefits come from fresh capital to buy governance tokens, not from any productive use of the capital itself. Once the inflow of this new capital slows down, the entire model will return to its original form. As a result, major agreements can only protect treasury worth hundreds of millions of dollars, denominated in self-governing tokens, but are unable to earn any competitive returns within the crypto world. Then in 2023, many tokenized versions of US Treasury bonds and dollar credit products began to be launched on the chain; for the first time, the agreement was able to deposit reserves into assets that can earn real dollar returns without even leaving the on-chain ecosystem. Since then, this has become the norm. A recent study of on-chain buyers by Arrakis tracked a total of $91.3 billion in deposits across more than 10 tokenized dollar yield products. They found that of the $124 billion in high-profile buyer funds that can be clearly attributed, the full two-thirds are solely treasury funds attributable to crypto protocols and DAOs. The rest is scattered among local crypto investors, exchanges, and market makers. (Image source: Arrakis) Of the funds being tracked, the amount from institutions such as pensions, asset management companies, or banks was zero. In this $36.2 billion market, which is constantly being hyped up by the industry as “institutional entry,” traditional investors are simply hard to find. BlackRock has launched a BUIDL fund aimed at bringing institutional funding to Ethereum. It's a fully regulated, tokenized treasury bond fund with a risk-free interest rate, designed specifically for pensions, so they can buy cryptocurrency directly without explaining it to the board of directors. But as of today, 98% of the capital is in the hands of local crypto buyers. Ethena alone accounted for more than half of the fund's total value through its USDTB product. The remaining seats of the top 10 holders were also split by agreements such as Ondo and Sky's Spark Sub DAO. (Image source: Arrakis) BUIDL is no exception; looking at the entire market, almost every top five holder of a tokenized RWA product controls more than 90% of the supply. If you want to anticipate the future, the best example is MakerDAO. In 2021, the agreement held only around 17 million DAI in real-world assets. And today, this...

24d agoWendy#HYPERLIQUID #RWA topics #tokenize

Sold after 10 years of holding, MakerDAO's initial team/investor address exchanged 1,050 MKR for 1,316 million USDC

In comparison, according to on-chain analyst Ember Monitoring, MakerDAO's initial team/investor address (receiving address 0x74B... F0E, selling address 0xE26... 7dc) sold 1,050 MKR holdings for 10 years 20 minutes ago, in exchange for 1,316 million USDC and transferred to Kraken. The address received 1,050 MKR in April 2016, and since then, with the exception of the MKR token upgrade migration in 2018, the relevant MKR has not been moved.

29d ago

Sky confirmed to provide USDS liquidity base for Spark, Uniswap stablecoin exchange system FX Layer

Comparing news, Sky (formerly MakerDAO), in collaboration with Spark and Uniswap, published an article stating that the approximately US$150 million in liquidity transferred from the previously launched stablecoin FX Layer project comes from Sky's USDS ecosystem. USDS is the initial denominated asset within the network, providing basic liquidity for USDS/USDT and USDS/PYUSD capital pools. The three parties said that this is the first large-scale implementation of this liquidity framework. The long-term vision is to allow more issuers (such as PayPal's PYUSD, Ripple's RLUSD, and institutions exploring stablecoin business, such as Robinhood and Revolut) to connect to this shared infrastructure, rather than independently building a liquidity network, while exploring how idle capital can still generate revenue under the governance framework when not participating in market making. Earlier, on June 25, Spark and Uniswap announced the joint launch of FX Layer, a stablecoin exchange system with the aim of providing shared liquidity infrastructure for banks, fintech companies, payment companies and other stablecoin issuers to avoid repeated construction of liquidity pools, market makers, and inventory management; Spark acts as an orchestration layer to determine how liquidity is distributed and coordinated among different stablecoins, and Uniswap v4 provides a programmable AMM architecture (DualPool based on the hooks mechanism) hook) Execute a specific transaction path. This article is sponsored by GENG, Build Your Fortune on GENG (https://geng.one)

54d agoburnking

Crypto projects' flee 'their old names in bulk: the liquidity reset game behind brand upgrades

Author: Gu Yu, ChainCatcher Original title: Why do crypto projects always like to change their names? In the traditional business world, brand assets are the lifeblood of an enterprise. Frequent name changes are almost tantamount to actively destroying a moat. Nvidia won't change its name every few years, Apple won't give up on Apple because of some kind of business transformation, and Nike won't bring back the brand because of a sluggish market cycle. But in the cryptocurrency world, the rules are often the opposite. According to RootData statistics, more than 16% of encryption projects have changed their names, and many well-known first-line projects have also changed their names in large numbers. Just yesterday, the on-chain IP ecosystem Story Protocol announced that it will change its name to DATA, and IP tokens will migrate 1:1 to new DATA tokens. Within a few months, Xion changed its name to Verona, Matrixport changed its name to BIT, and TON's token symbol to GRAM. Earlier, a number of well-known projects such as Klaytn, EOS, Fantom, MakerDAO, Elrond, and Matic Network changed their names. More extreme projects have even changed their names more than once. For example, MAITRIX used names such as CENTRAL, X Network, and XLD Finance; BitSafe used the names dlcBTC and DLC.Link; Talex used the names Read2N and Metale Protocol; and KGen used the names IndigG and Kratos Gaming Network. The names have changed more and more, but most projects have not gained new life due to the new name; instead, they have gradually fallen silent. This brings up a question that is rarely seriously discussed in the crypto industry: Why do crypto projects always like to change their names? The answer is probably not complicated: because in the crypto industry, brands aren't the most important assets; attention, narrative, token prices, and liquidity are. 1. Crypto brand loyalty is too low. The reason traditional brands are afraid to change their names is because user loyalty comes from long-term consumer experiences. A user has bought an iPhone for many years, drank Starbucks for many years, and worn Nike for many years. His perception of the brand was not formed in a day, nor did it change easily due to a certain marketing campaign. But cryptographic projects have a completely different user structure. Most early users aren't consumers in the traditional sense, but investors, airdrop hunters, liquidity providers, node participants, and narrative traders. They use products not necessarily because they are easy to use, but because they may have air investment, may be profitable, and may have room for growth. This means that crypto brands are naturally less loyal to users. In the traditional industry, users ask “Is this brand worth trusting”; in the crypto industry, users are more often asked “can this coin rise?” As long as prices are sluggish for a long time, the narrative fails, and the ecology is silent, the old name will instead become a negative asset. A name that has experienced a crash, duvet cover, hacking, team controversy, or route failure can hardly inspire the market's imagination. It doesn't carry brand assets, but K-line scars and community grievances. This is the root reason why crypto projects dare to change their names frequently: in many cases, old names have no moats, only historical baggage. 2. Renaming is a marketing strategy. Not every name change should simply be viewed as a “vest change.” The name change of some projects is indeed because the original name cannot carry the new strategic scope. As hot market concepts change, if the name includes old concepts such as “Social” and “DAO,” or if the meaning of the name does not match, changing the name is an inevitable choice. For example, the decentralized social networking protocol OpenSocial changed its name to Eden after transforming AI, the decentralized electronic signature platform EthSign chose to remove “Eth” from its name after expanding its business, and the Ethereum sidechain Matic Network changed its name to Polygon (meaning polygon) after building multiple scaling solutions. When the project's business boundaries fundamentally change, the original brand may limit external perception. The name change is a necessary strategic calibration at this point. Of course, there are also quite a few projects that actively “grab hot spots”, and you can get more attention by naming popular concepts. In the last metaverse boom, Elrond changed its name to MultiversX and directly added “Multiverse” elements to the name, apparently hoping to join Yuanyu...

57d agoburnking#encryption #Exchange coins

HashKey Exchange will launch Sky (SKY) on June 12th

According to the official announcement, HashKey Exchange, a licensed virtual asset trading platform under the Hong Kong listed company HashKey Holdings Limited (3887.HK), announced the launch of Sky protocol token SKY on June 12, 2026 to provide professional investors with OTC OTC OTC (trading pair: SKY/USD). Deposits and withdrawals can be carried out through the Ethereum network. The SKY token is the native governance and utility token of Sky Protocol, a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform developed from MakerDAO. SKY tokens play a central role in the protocol's ecosystem, supporting a range of financial services and community-driven governance.

71d ago

It is suspected that Ethereum co-created a Lubin-linked wallet to inject 110,000 ETH into Sky's vault, consolidating $259 million DAI positions

Comparative news, according to Lookonchain tracking, one was labeled “Joseph Lubin?” by Arkham Intelligence The Ethereum Genesis blockchain wallet deposited 110,000 ETH into three Sky Finance (formerly MakerDAO) gold deposits on Friday, which were completed in four transactions (40,000, 40,000, 30,000, and 1 ETH). The wallet had previously been inactive for over 3 years. At the time of the transfer, ETH was quoted at around $1,575, down about 10% in 24 hours. The deposit was intended to supplement collateral for the $25905 million outstanding DAI debt. The total amount of WETH collateral deposited into the latter three vaults is about 412,430, worth about US$677 million at the current price. The liquidation prices for the three vaults are 899, 1,020, and 1,056 US dollars, respectively, and there is a safety margin of about 55% from the nearest liquidation line. Neither Lubin nor ConsenSys publicly confirmed or denied ownership of the address. Previously, Lookonchain mistakenly attributed an LDO sell-off to Lido co-founder Cobie three days ago, then withdrew and confirmed that the wallet belonged to Wintermute, and the on-chain label may have been misjudged.

73d ago

It's Not Destruction, It's Reinventing: Hacking and Regulation Are Pushing DeFi to Realism

Author: Gu Yu, ChainCatcher Original title: Are Hacking and Regulation Ruining DeFi? In April 2026, a series of security disasters once again brought DeFi to the forefront of public opinion. The Kelp DAO and Drift Protocol attacks collectively caused losses of more than US$575 million. The total locked value (TVL) of DeFi plummeted from about US$172 billion to US$148 billion, and the TVL of the lending sector alone collapsed from US$53 billion to US$40 billion. In recent days, Manuel Aráoz, co-founder of the well-known security audit firm OpenZeppelin, said bluntly on the X platform: “I think all DeFi is unsafe anymore.” He even said that he has begun privately advising his family and friends to clear all DeFi positions, including Aave, MakerDAO, and Compound, which are known as “low-risk blue chip” agreements. Although this judgment is particularly harsh, it is worth pondering. After all, OpenZeppelin has long been one of the most important security infrastructure builders in the DeFi world, and its smart contract standards and security tools have evolved almost throughout the industry. If even those most familiar with smart contract security systems are beginning to question the risks of DeFi and withdraw decisively, then this certainly means that some deeper problem is surfacing. Whenever DeFi has experienced setbacks over the past few years, people have been able to quickly find a specific reason. When the market is sluggish, people blame the macro environment; when hacking occurs, people think it is due to technical flaws; when regulators act, people also attribute the problem to policy pressure. However, if you lengthen the time dimension, people will discover an increasingly clear fact: the plight of DeFi today is not caused by an attack, a regulatory policy, or a failed project, but rather the two core sets of logic that it was originally founded on are being challenged at the same time. A set of logic comes from the world of technology: code can replace trust. Another set of logic comes from the institutional world, that is, an open network can bypass the constraints of traditional financial systems. However, hacking and regulation have hit these two pillars separately. 1. The deep evolution of the DeFi security crisis In the past ten years, the core paradox in the field of DeFi security has not changed. Web3 security researchers have already identified this fatal asymmetry: defenders must close every possible gap that can be exploited, and attackers only need to succeed in one step. On the face of it, the attack methods are nothing more than cliché routines such as cross-chain bridge exploits, multi-signature privilege hijacking, and oracle manipulation. But the Kelp DAO and Drift Protocol incidents revealed an even harsher trend: the most fatal bugs are often not in the smart contract code. On April 18, the Ethereum liquidity heavy staking protocol Kelp DAO was attacked. The attackers used the DVN (Decentralized Verification Network) configuration vulnerability of the LayerZero cross-chain bridge, falsified cross-chain messages, and removed 116,500 rSetH from the cross-chain bridge within a few hours, which was about US$293 million at the price at the time. The nature of this disaster was a misconfiguration, not a code flaw. Kelp DAO chose “1-of-1” for LayerZero's cross-chain verification network — only one DVN node is required to confirm, and cross-chain messages are considered legitimate. When the attackers attacked the two RPC nodes that provided verification data and launched a DDoS attack, the entire bridging system was fictional. On April 1, Drift Protocol, one of the largest perpetual contract DEXs in the Solana ecosystem, was attacked and lost US$285 million, making it the biggest single DeFi attack incident so far in 2026, and the second largest hacking case in Solana's history. It's also not a smart contract bug. The attackers attacked at least two of the three signers of the multi-signature wallet through social engineering, using Solana's durable nonce feature to force them to pre-sign malicious transactions. Once the attackers obtained administrator rights, they completed the theft of funds in less than 12 minutes. The root cause of the attack is a complete failure of operational security (OpSec): improper configuration of multi-signature wallets, blind spots in key management, and flawed social engineering defenses. These two events revealed the deep evolution of the DeFi security crisis: the breakthrough of attacks is moving from traditional smart contract code bugs to the configuration layer and the humanity/OpSec layer...

85d agoburnking#DeFi #custodial #hacks

The lifting of the Mythos ban threatens DeFi, Strategy sell-off attacks faith, and the AI boom diverts funds, and the crypto market is entering a dark time

Comparing the news, this morning, Anthropic confirmed that it will launch the next Mythos-class model with ultra-flagship intelligence to all customers within the next few weeks as soon as possible. Meanwhile, Manuel Aráoz, founder of well-known crypto auditing firm OpenZeppelin, publicly warned that all DeFi, including Aave and MakerDAO, is no longer secure. Mythos will be a nuclear weapon for hackers to break into crypto DeFi. The data is in front of us. After Mythos was released privately, DeFi ushered in the darkest two months in history. Drift, KelpDAO, and THORChain were broken one after another, and the market's confidence in DeFi security has already collapsed. Strategy, on the other hand, seems to have begun the process of selling bitcoins this morning. Although the amount is small, this act can be described as having a profound impact on market beliefs. Furthermore, it is also the most important point. Under the current AI investment boom, there is a clear trend of market attention and capital diversion. Lack of innovation in the crypto field has exhausted the patience of practitioners. Investors and developers have fled crypto, and the trend of switching to AI has become a climate. In summary, the combination of the three major pressures is pushing the crypto industry to a double test of confidence and liquidity. In the short term, DeFi TVL is under pressure, Bitcoin beliefs are shaken, capital outflows may intensify, and the crypto market may enter a dark period full of uncertainty.

85d ago

Audit God urgently calls for “quick withdrawal”: AI agents are turning DeFi into ATMs for hackers

Author: Azuma Original title: Frontline Audit Okami Warning: All DeFi is unsafe, close soon! “I don't think all DeFi is secure anymore.” Manuel Aráoz, founder of OpenZeppelin, left an assertion on X yesterday, like a deep-water bomb, once again impacting the already stagnant DeFi market. Manuel has even stated that he has begun advising family and friends to withdraw funds from major DeFi agreements, including blue-chip agreements such as Aave, MakerDAO, and Compound, which were once viewed as low-risk. This isn't alarmist rhetoric from an outsider. On the contrary, Manuel himself is one of the core builders of the DeFi security system, and OpenZeppelin is one of the most mainstream security audit companies in the industry. Its contract library, security standards, and audit framework have penetrated almost the entire DeFi world. The reason for Manuel's complete shift in attitude was AI. Manuel is pessimistic that the ability of AI coding agents to identify and extract smart contract vulnerabilities is increasing exponentially. This means that problems that used to take weeks to be discovered by top white hat teams may now be scanned by AI within a few minutes; in the past, hackers needed to study protocol logic for a long time, and can now be directly automated by AI to analyze attack paths; in the past, the “openness and transparency” of DeFi was an advantage, but now it has become the best training corpus for attackers. Manuel also mentioned an even more fatal issue. Smart contract security is essentially an extremely asymmetrical game — the defender must fix all the bugs, and the attackers only need to find one to steal the funds. This asymmetry is rapidly unbalanced after AI began increasing attack efficiency exponentially. Cold reality: DeFi is already an ATM for hackers. Looking back at the DeFi security incidents of the past few months, you'll see that Manuel's concerns are not exaggerated. April was almost the worst month in DeFi history. On April 1 April Fool's Day, Drift Protocol stole $280 million due to administrative privilege hijacking and multi-signature execution vulnerabilities (see “April Fool's Day Jokes? The Drift Protocol was stolen over US$280 million, or the second largest DeFi heist in the Solana ecosystem”). Then, on April 19, Kelp DAO stole $292 million due to the breach of the bridging agreement (see “DeFi Stole Another $292 Million, Now Even Aave Unsafe?”) Hackers later escaped through loan agreements such as Aave, causing the whole of DeFi to fall into the shadow of bad debts and their associated effects. However, after entering May, not only did the number of accidents not decrease; on the contrary, they spread further. On May 15, THORChain was attacked. Newly added node operators used the GG20 Threshold Signature Scheme (TSS) vulnerability to restructure private treasury keys and directly execute outbound transactions, causing losses of over 10 million dollars. On May 18, Verus's bridging protocol was attacked. The attackers falsified cross-chain payloads, bypassed verification to extract assets from Ethereum reserves, and stole approximately $11.58 million. On May 19, the Echo Protocol on Monad was attacked due to a private key leak. The attackers minted 1,000 eBTC (worth $76.7 million) and withdrew funds via Curvance through previously tested attack paths. On May 24, StabLR, a compliant stablecoin issuer under the MiCA regulatory system, was attacked. The hacker made a profit of more than 2.8 million US dollars by issuing additional EURR and USDR, causing EURR and USDR to become unanchored. On May 25, the SquidRouter module was attacked, and 86 Gnosis Safe wallets were stolen as a result of which approximately $3 million in assets were stolen. On May 27, the private key of the StakeDAO deployer was leaked on Arbitrum. The attackers minted about 5.45 trillion vsDCRV, which were partially exchanged for 43.7 ETH and escaped. High-frequency security incidents have sounded the alarm, from on-chain code to off-chain management, De...

86d agoburnking#AI #DeFi