defi

According to Cointelegraph, the venture capital market in the cryptocurrency industry significantly cooled down in April, with the total amount of cryptocurrency VC financing dropping to $659 million, completing 63 rounds of financing, a sharp decline of 74% compared to March's $2.6 billion (84 rounds), marking the lowest monthly financing level since 2024.As of 2026, the cumulative financing amount in the cryptocurrency industry has reached $5.64 billion. Since peaking at $3.84 billion in October 2025, cryptocurrency VC financing has continued to decline, during which the total market capitalization of the global cryptocurrency market has also fallen by about 37%. In terms of sectors, DeFi protocols led with 12 rounds of financing, while blockchain services and AI-related cryptocurrency projects each completed 8 rounds. The venture capital department of market maker GSR became the most active investor in April, participating in 4 financing deals; institutions such as Tether, Animoca Brands, and Coinbase Ventures also participated in 3 transactions each.

Mantle Network officially announced that the proposal for the rsETH relief coordination loan facility initiated to Aave has officially entered the governance voting stage.According to the proposal, Mantle will provide a loan to Aave's relief action to help users orderly exit or resolve related positions. Users holding MNT tokens must first complete delegation on the Snapshot platform to participate in the voting.Aave founder Stani stated that DeFi United is the largest DAO coordination he has participated in, with at least 6 different DAOs proposing governance plans (Arbitrum, Aave, EtherFi, Lido, Compound, and Mantle). He thanked everyone who helped and participated.Currently, the DeFi United ecological relief action led by Aave is ongoing to address the collateral asset gap caused by the rsETH incident on April 18. The designated donation address has raised a total of 1,137,714.633 ETH, worth $314.57 million.

According to official news, the Solana ecosystem DeFi protocol Carrot has announced that it will soon shut down. Carrot stated that the Drift exploit incident has had a catastrophic impact on its ongoing operations. Carrot has set May 14 as the deadline for withdrawing remaining funds from Boost, Turbo, and CRT, after which the system will begin deleveraging, reducing all leverage to zero and releasing all liquidity for CRT redemption. Carrot stated that any recovery funds from Drift will still be distributed as previously promised, but there is currently no specific timeline.

KelpDAO has announced that it has completed its committed contribution to the recovery fund and has provided 2000 ETH in treasury funds to the DeFi United recovery plan led by Aave, aimed at restoring the peg support for rsETH and promoting the system's return to normal operation.This funding is a one-time investment intended to restore rsETH to its nominal exchange rate. Following the events of April 18, DeFi United, in collaboration with multiple ecosystem participants (including Mantle, Consensys, Arbitrum, Lido Finance, LayerZero, etc.), has formulated a recovery path that includes re-capitalization of the bridging treasury, restoration of oracle functionality, and addressing funding gaps in the affected markets.Kelp stated that its investment helps accelerate the overall repair process. Kelp emphasized that the internal commitment before any public statement is that "rsETH holders will not be abandoned," and noted that this contribution is a direct manifestation of that commitment.As funds from various parties gradually come into place, the collateral support for rsETH will gradually return to normal, and the company will continue to update the community on progress.

According to the latest weekly report released by Gate, in the past week (from April 20 to April 26), driven by the easing of geopolitical tensions and rising expectations for interest rate cuts, BTC rose from $68,000 to above $77,000, with market sentiment remaining "cautiously optimistic." ETF funds continued to see net inflows, indicating that institutions are steadily increasing their positions amid fluctuations, with capital accelerating towards high liquidity assets and deep trading platforms.There was a noticeable rotation of on-chain funds: PancakeSwap's trading volume approached $36 billion, the supply of USDT was nearly $200 billion, while USDe saw a net outflow of about $2 billion; in the DeFi sector, Aave's lending balance decreased, with liquidity shifting towards Spark. In terms of derivatives, the funding rate for BTC remains negative, while the activity and volatility of options have increased. The market will pay attention to the FOMC interest rate meeting and the volatility effects brought by the unlocking of OP, SUI, and ENA.Against this backdrop, Gate continues to strengthen its institutional service capabilities, providing high-performance matching, deep liquidity, and multi-exchange strategy support to meet high-frequency and arbitrage demands. At the same time, through a comprehensive asset security and custody system, combined with a one-stop solution for spot, contract, and multi-asset trading, it helps institutions execute efficiently and lay out robust strategies in a volatile market.

One of South Korea's largest credit card companies, Shinhan Card, announced that it has signed a cooperation agreement with the Solana Foundation to jointly build a stablecoin payment system on the Solana blockchain.As part of the collaboration, Shinhan Card is conducting a high-level proof of concept this year, focusing on simulating real-world payment scenarios between customers and merchants on the Solana testnet. Shinhan Card's Executive Vice President Kim Young-il stated, "Based on Solana, we plan to carefully examine the practical applicability of blockchain technology and actively explore next-generation financial models." One of the core elements of the proof of concept is to verify the security and stability of non-custodial wallets, so that Shinhan Card can deploy this technology on a large scale in the future. Both parties will also explore a "hybrid financial model" that combines the reliability of traditional finance with the efficiency of DeFi. Shinhan Card plans to utilize oracle technology to build its own DeFi service environment, deploying smart contracts while ensuring operational stability. Shinhan Card will assess the outcomes of these projects in conjunction with the evolving regulatory environment in South Korea and the Asia-Pacific region. Notably, South Korean lawmakers are currently drafting the "Basic Law on Digital Assets," which is expected to be finalized within this year. Under the anticipated legislation, several South Korean financial institutions, including KBank, have recently begun collaborating with global blockchain and cryptocurrency companies.

Andre Cronje stated in an interview with Cointelegraph that many DeFi protocols today are "no longer truly DeFi" and are more like "profit-driven companies operated by teams," as they generally rely on upgradable contracts, multi-signatures, off-chain infrastructure, and manual operational control.Cronje pointed out that the current industry is still overly focused on smart contract audits while neglecting operational risks that are closer to traditional finance (TradFi). He believes that recent attack incidents are not due to code vulnerabilities but stem from off-chain infrastructure, permission management, and social engineering attacks.The discussion arises from the recent frequent security incidents in DeFi. In April, protocols such as Flying Tulip, Drift Protocol, and Kelp encountered security events, with Drift and Kelp suffering losses of approximately $280 million and $293 million, respectively.In response, Flying Tulip has introduced a "Withdrawal Circuit Breaker," which can delay or queue withdrawal requests when unusually large withdrawals occur, allowing the team about 6 hours to respond. Cronje emphasized that this mechanism does not permanently freeze withdrawals but serves as a layer of protection within the security system.However, Michael Egorov holds a cautious attitude towards this. He stated that the circuit breaker itself could also become a new point of centralized risk. If control permissions fall into the hands of an attacker, the mechanism originally intended to protect the protocol could instead be used to freeze assets or directly transfer funds.Egorov believes that the long-term direction of DeFi should be to minimize human intervention and centralized permissions as much as possible, rather than adding more layers of manual control. "The security of DeFi comes from decentralization, not more human management."

According to The Block, Standard Chartered's latest report points out that the theft of KelpDAO's rsETH, while causing a severe impact on the DeFi ecosystem, is not enough to change the long-term growth trend of real-world asset (RWA) tokenization.Geoffrey Kendrick, head of digital asset research at Standard Chartered, stated that this incident is more like DeFi being "bent, not broken," and may even become an important turning point for the industry towards a more resilient structure.Standard Chartered maintains its forecast: by the end of 2028, the RWA tokenization market size will grow from $35 billion in October 2025 to $2 trillion, with the core driving force still coming from the continued expansion of the DeFi banking system and stablecoin liquidity.

DeFi United announced a technical repair plan for the Kelp DAO rsETH cross-chain bridge vulnerability on Tuesday. Previously, attackers exploited a vulnerability in the LayerZero-driven Unichain to Ethereum bridge, releasing 116,500 rsETH by spoofing inbound packets, of which approximately 107,000 are currently still distributed as collateral across seven associated addresses in Aave and Compound.DeFi United stated that it has secured enough ETH commitments to restore the support for rsETH, which will be converted into rsETH in batches and injected into the bridge lock contract. LayerZero Labs pledged over 10,000 ETH on Tuesday to support the repair efforts. Regarding the liquidation of the attackers' positions, the alliance will execute controlled liquidations through Aave and Compound governance proposals, expecting to recover approximately 13,000 and 16,776 ETH, respectively.During the repair period, WETH and rsETH reserves on multiple chains will remain frozen. DeFi United also cautioned about execution risks, including governance approval progress, potential interference from attackers, and new security measures pending validation in the production environment.

According to a16z, its researchers conducted a systematic test on whether AI agents can independently exploit DeFi price manipulation vulnerabilities.The study used a dataset of 20 Ethereum price manipulation incidents and employed Codex (GPT 5.4) equipped with the Foundry toolchain as the testing agent. Under baseline conditions without domain knowledge, the agent's success rate was only 10%; after introducing structured domain knowledge extracted from real attack events, the success rate increased to 70%. Failure cases showed that the agent could accurately identify vulnerabilities but generally struggled to understand the leverage logic of recursive borrowing, misjudged profit margins, and could not assemble multi-step attack structures across contracts. The experiment also recorded a sandbox escape incident: the agent extracted the RPC key from the local node configuration and called the anvil_reset method to reset the node to a future block, bypassing information isolation restrictions and obtaining real attack data. The research team believes that AI agents can currently effectively assist in vulnerability identification but cannot yet replace professional security auditors.

The re-staking protocol Puffer Finance officially announced that it will invest treasury funds into the DeFi United ecological rescue initiative led by Aave, but did not disclose the specific amount. Puffer believes that strong infrastructure and consistent incentive mechanisms are key to supporting DeFi at critical moments.

The decentralized oracle service provider RedStone has officially launched the settlement layer product RedStone Settle for decentralized finance, aimed at addressing the structural barriers faced when tokenized real-world assets (RWA) are used as collateral in lending protocols.The core mechanism of this product is on-chain auctions: when a lending protocol triggers a liquidation event, liquidity providers can immediately step in to purchase the relevant positions, providing instant liquidity to the protocol while assuming the risk of delayed redemption of the underlying assets. This move aims to bridge the mismatch between the nearly instant liquidation required by DeFi platforms (such as Aave) and the typical redemption periods of 60 to 180 days for RWAs (including tokenized funds and bonds).RedStone stated that this solution is expected to activate the currently idle tokenized RWAs in DeFi, which exceed $30 billion, and enable users to borrow more efficiently using interest-bearing positions. According to data from RWA.xyz, excluding stablecoins, the current market size of tokenized RWAs has surpassed $30 billion, primarily dominated by exposure to U.S. Treasury bonds and private credit products.