$13.2 billion evaporated in two days! KelpDAO hack triggers massive DeFi capital flight

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The KelpDAO protocol suffered a hack over the weekend, resulting in a loss of $292 million. As the incident continues to unfold and affect multiple protocols, market panic has spread rapidly, triggering a massive capital flight from the DeFi ecosystem. Within just 48 hours, the total value locked (TVL) across the entire DeFi sector evaporated by over $13.2 billion, leading to a significant contraction in market liquidity. Data from DefiLlama shows that over the past 48 hours, the total TVL in the DeFi space plummeted from $99.497 billion to $86.286 billion. Among these, the lending leader Aave saw users withdraw as much as $8.45 billion, with its TVL sliding to $17.947 billion. During the same period, multiple protocols including Euler and Sentora experienced double-digit percentage outflows, with lending, liquid restaking, and yield-bearing protocols being the hardest hit. Exchanging "counterfeit bills" for real money: A $290 million hack shakes the entire network. This storm originated from a hack on the KelpDAO cross-chain bridge, resulting in a loss of $292 million. The attacker used the stolen rsETH as collateral to borrow funds from various major lending platforms. Since these stolen tokens lack substantial asset backing, borrowing against them effectively creates a potential bad debt risk for lenders. This is akin to someone depositing counterfeit bills in a traditional bank and then borrowing real money, ultimately forcing the bank to write off the bad debt. Protocols urgently froze the affected markets, while panicked users rushed to withdraw funds, leading to a comprehensive decline in overall TVL. Faced with the sudden bad debt crisis, major DeFi protocols urgently activated defense mechanisms and froze the affected trading markets. Unexpectedly, this only exacerbated retail panic, triggering an even more frantic wave of withdrawals and ultimately causing a landslide decline in TVL. Interestingly, compared to the violent fluctuations in capital, token prices remained relatively calm. Data shows that the AAVE token fell only about 2.5% over the past 24 hours, while tokens such as Uniswap (UNI) and Chainlink (LINK) saw declines of less than 1%. The crisis of highly stacked "Legos" Regarding this incident, Peter Chung, Head of Research at Presto Research, pointed out in a recent report that this has thoroughly exposed the fragility of cross-chain infrastructure, particularly the verification systems used by cross-chain bridges. Preliminary analysis suggests that the security vulnerability likely occurred at the "verification layer" rather than the common "smart contract" code vulnerabilities seen in the past. Peter Chung further warned that the DeFi ecosystem is highly stacked and interconnected like building blocks. While this characteristic brings capital efficiency, it also makes the collapse of a single node extremely prone to triggering a domino effect. Even if some platforms were not directly exposed to the risks of this hack, they will ultimately be affected as the chain reaction of panic withdrawals and market freezes continues to unfold.

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