Aave, a leading lending platform, has successfully raised approximately $160 million to cover the $200 million in bad debt resulting from the largest decentralized finance exploit of the year, as reported by Arkham on Saturday. The blockchain analytics platform stated, 'So far, AAVE has raised $160M to cover the bad debt from the Kelp DAO Exploit, at defiunited.eth. The largest contributors, Mantle and AAVE DAO, have together raised 55,000 ETH, valued at $127M.' Following a $292 million security breach that left the largest lender in the crypto borrowing sector facing a financial crisis, Aave and several major crypto firms launched a coordinated recovery effort to stabilize DeFi markets. Led by Aave service providers, the initiative, known as DeFi United, aims to restore support for rsETH, the yield-bearing derivative token of ether at the center of the exploit.
Aave founder Stani Kulecho announced, 'I'm personally contributing 5,000 ETH to DeFi United as we continue working together with partners.' With ether's current price at approximately $2,346, his contribution is worth around $11,730,000. The exploit was linked to a vulnerability in KelpDAO's integration with LayerZero, where an attacker created 116,500 unbacked rsETH tokens, leaving Aave with impaired collateral and triggering a run on deposits as lenders rushed to exit, resulting in $10 billion in withdrawals. The effort to eliminate the bad debt focuses primarily on stabilizing the system through a coordinated bailout to recapitalize rsETH and minimize losses. This year's second-largest exploit occurred in late March when an attacker drained at least $270 million from the Drift Protocol on Solana by exploiting a legitimate feature called 'durable nonces,' rather than a code bug or stolen keys.