crypto

Sage D. Young3h

Aave sinks as another service provider leaves

The native token of the largest lending protocol in DeFi has shed roughly $163 million in market capitalization, dropping nearly 11% over the past 24 hours, after news that another service provider is leaving.

Chaos Labs on Monday announced it was stepping down as a risk manager for the Aave DAO, citing concerns over V4 of the protocol and the recent exit of other core contributors.

The risk management firm, which has been contributing to Aave since November 2022, decided to end its engagement with the protocol in part because of a “fundamental misalignment on how risk should be managed at Aave,” Chaos Labs CEO and founder Omer Goldberg said on X.

The V4 protocol introduced a new smart contract code base. “When that architecture is rewritten from scratch, the risk infrastructure must follow. As a result, while the scope changed materially, the resourcing did not. Aave Labs may be comfortable with those trade-offs. We are not,” Goldberg stated.

Chaos Labs’ termination comes after service providers Aave Chan Initiative and Bored Ghosts Developing Labs announced leaving due to centralization concerns with Aave Labs, which is headed by the protocol’s founder, Stani Kulechov.

In response to Chaos Labs’ recent decision, Kulechov said, “There is no disruption to the Aave Protocol, its smart contracts, asset listings, or network deployments.” Kulechov added that Aave was not supportive of several elements of Chaos Labs’ initial proposal, such as a higher-risk management payment of $8 million.

Aave has a total value locked of over $24 billion. V4 went live at the end of March and has seen around $10 million in deposits in the first week.

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Sage D. Young40m

The FBI revealed in a Monday press release that Americans submitted 181,565 complaints of schemes involving cryptocurrency and reported losses totaling around $11.4 billion last year, a 22% increase from 2024.

The age range most affected were people older than 60. Those in this bucket had the highest crypto complaint count at 44,555 with losses at $4.4 billion, per the annual report from the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), a division of the FBI tasked with gathering intelligence on cybercrime.

One cybercrime the report pointed to was cryptocurrency investment fraud, which are sophisticated long-term scams using psychological manipulation, an appearance of legitimacy, and exploitation of cryptocurrencies to deceive victims into investing large sums of money.

“These scams are largely perpetrated by organized criminal enterprises based in Southeast Asia using victims of human trafficking as forced labor to run the scam operations,” per the report.

The FBI report comes as the crypto ecosystem is still reeling from a recent $270 million exploit that was planned six months in the making, a change from the initial estimate of a multiple weeks.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

Bloomberg analyst outlines all the reasons he’s sticking with his call that bitcoin will crater to $10,000

His one caveat: if it can hold the $75,000 level, bitcoin bulls may “prove him wrong.” Other experts called his prediction an “attention-grabbing extreme” and “almost unimaginable.”

Bitcoin napkin holder

Ethereum outpaces crypto rivals after breaking 6-month losing streak

Meanwhile, BitMine added 71,252 tokens worth $154 million to its stockpile, the highest buying pace since December.

Crypto Currencies Exchange In Poland.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

Strategy reports more than $14 billion unrealized loss as bitcoin remains stuck in tight range

Bitcoin managed to briefly cross $70,000 for the first time in April, but it couldn’t hold the line.

Sad Saylor

crypto

Sage D. Young4/2/26

Solana drops to price not seen since February as Drift exploit rattles sentiment

Solana has historically seen its largest price declines on Thursdays, and today is no exemption as the crypto industry reels from the over $270 million exploit that occurred yesterday on Drift, a trading venue native to the solana blockchain.

The price of solana has decreased 5.5% to around $78, a level not seen since February, data from CoinGecko shows.

Drift was one of the largest protocols on the solana network by total value locked, which now sits at nearly $245 million. The total value locked on solana has shrunk by nearly $1 billion since the incident, per DefiLlama.

Exploit likely involved from social engineering

The attack, which has turned into a wider contagion event, is unsettling for those in the industry. It did not come from a bug in the protocol’s smart contracts or programs. “Humans remain the bottleneck,” Mert Mumtaz, cofounder and CEO of solana development firm Helius, said in response to the incident.

The exploit involved unauthorized transaction approvals likely facilitated through social engineering. The sophisticated operation “appears to have involved multi-week preparation and staged execution,” the team said on Thursday.

Omer Goldberg, founder of risk management firm Chaos Labs, added, “The DeFi [decentralized finance] ecosystem continues to grow in scale, but not in operational security.”

“Protocols now have custody of hundreds of millions in user funds while depending on admin key setups that would be considered unacceptable in TradFi for a fraction of that AUM [assets under management],” Goldberg wrote on X.

“Most hacks come down to the simple act of one clicking a link they shouldn’t have clicked. These are picking up in pace, be extra cautious clicking any link or file,” continued Helius’ Mumtaz.

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