Aave Faces $6 Billion Deposit Exodus After Kelp Hack Exposes DeFi Lender's Vulnerabilities

Aave has experienced a massive exodus of $6.6 billion in deposits, but it's not due to a direct hack on the platform. The total value locked in the protocol dropped from $26.4 billion on April 18 to approximately $20 billion by Sunday morning, according to DefiLlama. The AAVE token price fell 16% to $92, while daily fees surged to $1.99 million as liquidations swept through the weekend. Depositors are fleeing because Aave is shouldering a burden it didn't create. When attackers drained 116,500 rsETH from Kelp's bridge on Saturday, they used the stolen tokens as collateral on Aave V3 to borrow wrapped ether. On-chain trackers estimate the Aave-specific borrow to be around $196 million, with total positions across Aave, Compound, and Euler totaling approximately $236 million. Aave is the largest lending protocol in DeFi, allowing users to deposit crypto to earn yield, while others borrow against collateral. Kelp, a liquid restaking protocol, takes already-staked ether on Ethereum and channels it through a separate yield-generating system called EigenLayer, issuing a receipt token, rsETH, in exchange. This rsETH is what users trade and, crucially, what some users posted as collateral on Aave to borrow against. On Saturday, attackers tricked Kelp's cross-chain bridge into releasing 116,500 rsETH, worth about $292 million, to a controlled address. They then deposited the stolen rsETH onto Aave V3 as collateral and borrowed wrapped ether against it. Aave initially stated that the Umbrella reserve would cover any deficit, but by Saturday afternoon, the language had softened to exploring paths to offset the deficit. The concentration of damage on Aave can be attributed to its loan book spanning 22 chains, with Ethereum alone holding $14.24 billion of the $17.82 billion in outstanding borrows. WETH accounts for 39.49% of all loans on the protocol, meaning the attack targeted the exact collateral-to-WETH pair that dominates Aave's book. Stani Kulechov, Aave's founder, emphasized that the exploit was external and the protocol's contracts were not compromised. However, Aave accepted a liquid restaking token as collateral, and that token's backing vanished on a bridge Aave does not control, resulting in depositors losing either way. Liquid restaking tokens were whitelisted across major lending protocols due to their yield and growing share of Ethereum's locked value. Risk models priced them as if they would hold peg under normal conditions, but none accounted for a scenario where the collateral goes to zero because a bridge on an unrelated chain was exploited. As trader Altcoin Sherpa noted on X, 'AAVE is the backbone of DeFi, with billions invested, and nearly every new DeFi infrastructure on new chains is a fork of it. When AAVE has contagion risk, it exposes the fragility of the entire system.' The token price is now attempting to determine whether Umbrella is sufficient to cover the hole and whether stkAAVE holders who back that reserve will absorb the loss.