...and is definitely not an enormous grift that's pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet.
Created by Molly White. Subscribe to her newsletter for weekly recaps.
Ultimately, facing being outvoted, the attacker dumped their MFAM holdings and the proposal was canceled as their balance had fallen below the proposal threshold.
This was only the most recent of Moonwell's troubles after the protocol suffered a $1.78 million loss in February due to an oracle misconfiguration and a $3.7 million loss in November 2025.
Balancer co-founder Fernando Martinelli has said he strongly considered shutting down the protocol entirely, but ultimately decided to continue the project as it generates a relatively small amount of revenue. Instead, the project will move to being operated by a DAO and operating company, which Martinelli hopes will allow them to dodge "real and ongoing legal exposure" and "the liability of past security incidents".
Although another Balancer co-founder has optimistically presented this as "the start of a better chapter" for Balancer, it remains to be seen whether a skeleton crew will be able to revive the project.
An exploiter took advantage of a flaw in USR's minting code to create tens of millions of USR tokens without depositing any assets to back them. The attacker then sold the unbacked USR, crashing the stablecoin's price to as low as $0.14. The attacker has profited at least 11,400 ETH (~$24 million), though they are still selling.
Some defi protocols paused USR-exposed strategies to avoid downstream impacts. Resolv issued a statement that the token's collateral pool was unaffected, though this is likely little comfort for those who purchased the unbacked USR.
While the exploit left the Venus Protocol with over $2 million in bad debt, it's not clear if the attacker even made money from the exploit. The exploiter's position was ultimately liquidated, collapsing the increase in THE price. However, it's possible the exploiter took advantage of the price discrepancy elsewhere to profit.
The Venus Protocol has had a number of issues in the past — notably in June 2023, when the team developing the BNB Chain had to intervene when the a thief borrowed $150 million on Venus against stolen tokens and then faced liquidation.
