The entire industry joins forces to rescue Aave's $200 million bad debt; can DeFi United really fill the massive gap?

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Facing the $200 million asset loss triggered by the KelpDAO exploit, Aave founder has spearheaded the formation of the DeFi United fund, attempting to resolve the chain reaction through collective industry capital injection. (Context: Deep dive into AAVE V4 upgrade: Reshaping lending with modularity, can old tokens see a new spring?) (Background: Aave community votes to withdraw from Polygon lending, DeFi ecosystem risks losing $300 million in TVL) Centralized finance has a core tenet: user funds are held by code, and if something goes wrong, there is no one to hold accountable. Now, AAVE, the largest lending protocol in DeFi, is organizing the entire industry to pool money and take responsibility. In the early hours of April 24, Aave founder Stani Kulechov posted on X, stating he would contribute 5,000 ETH to a fund called "DeFi United," worth approximately $11.5 million at the time, to cover the shortfall. Aave is my life's work and we're working nonstop to find the best possible outcome for users. I’m personally contributing 5000 ETH to DeFi United as we continue working together with partners on formalizing more commitments. I’m working to see this resolved and market conditions… — Stani (@StaniKulechov) April 23, 2026 Earlier this week, a hacker exploited a vulnerability in the KelpDAO cross-chain bridge, minting a batch of fake tokens without any collateral, deposited them into Aave as collateral, and borrowed nearly $200 million worth of real ETH. Aave is the largest lending protocol in DeFi, managing over $30 billion in user assets. Once the news spread, whales and institutional users were the first to withdraw funds. Within six days, Aave's total deposits dropped by nearly $15 billion, and the core liquidity pools were drained to the bottom. Depositors who didn't get out are now unable to withdraw their own money. According to CoinDesk, the utilization rates of USDT and USDC pools once approached 100%. Stani's tweet is worth pondering; he called Aave his "life's work." When a founder publicly uses this term, it usually means the situation is severe enough to warrant a statement. So, this DeFi United is an industry rescue mechanism led by the Aave founder. As of today, the five parties that have publicly committed to contributing include the Ethereum staking protocol Lido, the restaking protocol EtherFi, the Golem Foundation, and Bybit's Mantle. However, a closer look reveals that the rescue efforts from these five parties have not yet been fully implemented. Currently, the only fully confirmed contributions are Stani's own 5,000 ETH and the 1,000 ETH from the Golem Foundation. Lido's proposal to allocate 2,500 stETH and EtherFi's proposal to contribute 5,000 ETH are still in their respective DAO voting processes. The 30,000 ETH proposed by Mantle is in the form of a loan and is currently in the planning stage on the governance forum. Lido's proposal includes a prerequisite: funds will only be disbursed once the full recovery plan is assembled. This means if the total amount is not met, it may not be disbursed. How large was the KelpDAO funding gap? The hacker borrowed a total of approximately 99,600 ETH. The Arbitrum Security Council froze 30,700 ETH, leaving a remaining gap of about 68,900 ETH, equivalent to approximately $160 million. The total potential support from the five parties adds up to about 43,500 ETH, leaving a shortfall of 25,000 ETH that no one has claimed yet. In September 2008, two weeks after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the U.S. Treasury Department launched something called TARP, short for "Troubled Asset Relief Program." Simply put, Wall Street caused a disaster, and the government organized a group of financial institutions to inject capital into the pool to share the losses and prevent a systemic collapse. What DeFi United is doing is structurally almost identical to TARP. If Aave's bad debt is not filled, the consequences will not be limited to Aave alone. The rsETH token is used as collateral by many DeFi protocols. According to the Aave incident report, Aave itself holds approximately 83% of the circulating supply of rsETH. If the peg of these assets cannot be restored, the bad debt will spread like a chain reaction to all protocols that accept rsETH. According to the description in the Lido proposal, users of the

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