Curve Founder Asks “Are We an Industry of Clowns?” After $750M in DeFi Hacks

Imagine your grandmother puts her life savings into Aave – one of the biggest DeFi protocols on the planet. Then on Monday morning she tries to withdraw and cannot.

Not because Aave was hacked. Aave says it is operating as intended. Not because rsETH was hacked. rsETH says all code is safe. Not because LayerZero was hacked. LayerZero says everything is working fine.

She just cannot get her money out.

That scenario played out for real depositors this past weekend. And now Michael Egorov, the founder of Curve Finance, one of DeFi’s most battle-tested protocols, has had enough.

“WTF? Are we industry of clowns?” he posted on X.

The Problem Is Not the Hacks. It Is How We Build.

Egorov’s argument cuts deeper than the rsETH exploit itself. His point is that $606 million in DeFi losses in April alone – led by the $292 million Kelp DAO drain and the $285 million Drift exploit – and over $750 million in 2026 so far, is not bad luck.

It is the predictable result of an industry that keeps adding centralized single points of failure without thinking through what happens when they break.

“All issues like this should be prevented BEFORE they happen, not AFTER,” he wrote. “Number of single points of failure should be reduced, not increased. When these points of failure are unavoidable – trust should be split.”

That last line matters. He is not calling for DeFi to become TradFi. He is calling for DeFi to take its own architecture seriously.

Egorov Wants the Ethereum and Solana Foundations to Step Up

Egorov specifically called on the Ethereum Foundation and Solana Foundation to bring ecosystem projects together and develop shared safety principles – covering how to build safely, how to verify safety, and how to properly configure infrastructure that other protocols rely on.

He also suggested the industry could learn something from traditional finance, which has long dealt with centralized points of failure and developed frameworks around protecting them.

When one follower asked whether Curve itself would share its own principles and risk management practices first, Egorov replied: “Need to formalize the set of rules but yes, possible.”

That means Curve Finance may be among the first major DeFi protocols to publish its own security standards – a concrete first step toward the industry-wide framework Egorov is calling for.

DeFi Will Win, But Only If It Grows Up

He closed his post with three words: “DeFi will win.”

The conviction is still there. But after a month that has exposed exactly how fragile the ecosystem’s trust assumptions are, winning is going to require building differently.