DAOUSDT
DAO Maker / Tether USD
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I don’t believe DAO was a hack when it happened. It was an exploit of a flaw in how smart contracts work, but it was simply executing the contract as it was written.
I also don’t think rolling it back was the right solution specifically for the reason you said: it proves that the ledger isn’t immutable.
It sucks that all those funds should have been stolen forever, but that’s what an immutable and uncensorable ledger is. The initial problem was in the design of the contract that got exploited.

liquidity lock and renounced ownership stopped being meaningful signals maybe 18 months ago once people figured out how to write withdraw functions into the liquidity contract before locking it. what i actually look at now is whether the deployer wallet has any on-chain history before this project fresh wallets with zero prior activity and a shiny new token are the tell. second thing is token distribution: if 3 wallets hold 40%+ and theyre not labeled team/DAO with a vesting cliff, assume its a coordinated dump waiting to happen. none of this is foolproof but it filters out the lazier rugs

JUST IN: Aave DAO Contributes 25,000 ETH To DeFi United

The sybil problem is unsolvable without identity, and identity is the one thing crypto was designed to avoid. Every DAO governance system either accepts plutocracy (token-weighted) or requires KYC (kills the point). There's no middle ground that actually works at scale.

The Sun vs WLFI case is going to set precedent for every DAO governance dispute going forward. If a protocol can freeze your tokens and strip voting rights without on-chain consensus, the "governance" is just branding over admin keys. This is the Kelp DAO debate all over again but with political actors instead of hackers.

just a few voters can change everything in a DAO

Nouns DAO ends daily auctions after 10 voters force change

It feels like the entire DeFi industry is moving as one coordinated DAO right now. Albeit, not a very good one
IMO, freezing assets is a very slippery slope. My take is that security and asset protection should be at the app level and NOT the protocol level
Once protocols and blockchains start changing block production, the “immutability” of crypto deteriorates. We are only as strong as our weakest link.
Do you agree with tether freezing these assets or do you think this is a huge misstep for crypto ideals?

I feel like having all these projects governed by DAOs was already a departure from where we were supposed to be going. We were supposed to be building immutable systems that didn't rely on governance, but having governance is easier and it turned out the users dgaf so people doing that got out-competed by things with token voting, even though we always knew that token voting awful.
Earlier systems actually had much better crypto-economics than what people are using nowadays, for example the original DAO (the one with the reentry bug) had the ability to exit to a sub-DAO, and early prediction market designs like Augur had governance by fork which is much more robust.

My DAO is based on wallet count, not token count. I'm sure somebody will try to abuse it, but it will be obvious.

Hey everyone - I’m Padrrre, leading comms at Hinkal.
We’ve been building privacy infrastructure for on-chain finance across multiple ecosystems, and we just deployed Hinkal Pay on TRON DAO.
I wanted to share it here because I think it could actually be useful for some of the teams operating on TRON.
As you all know, TRON is one of the largest stablecoin rails - but like any public chain, transactions are fully transparent.
For individuals, that’s often fine, but for businesses, it can get risky:
balances, counterparties, and payment flows are all visible.
From what we’ve seen, there hasn’t really been a practical, widely usable way to keep payment activity private on TRON so far.
What we built is a way to execute settlements and payouts without exposing that data publicly - while still using the same wallets, same stablecoins, without changing custody.
The idea is simple: funds move into a confidential balance linked to your existing wallet, and from there you can send payments without revealing sensitive details on-chain.
Compliance is still supported (KYT screening + selective disclosure when needed), but the default isn’t full transparency anymore.
Genuinely curious, do teams on TRON actually care about transaction privacy today, or is full transparency not really an issue in practice?

Juicy. I hope this is about the Kelp DAO fiasco... I heard some of the stolen funds were moving via USDT on Tron...

Pow vs PoS doesn’t grant immutability either. In fact Bitcoin has been rolled back before (Google the 184 billion BTC bug), while Ethereum never has been (the DAO was a fork, but that was also under PoW). Arbitrum is neither PoW or PoS, it’s an optimistic rollup.
In reality nothing grants true immutability. If a consensus of the network wants a change, the chain will change. And that’s that. This includes Bitcoin. Hence why people are discussing freezing Satoshi’s BTC before quantum computers crack his private keys.
Legitimacy in crypto is a subject Vitalik actually helped define, it’s well worth reading! See here; https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html

The burned keys question is the central paradox of DeFi. Burned keys = true decentralization but also no bug fixes, no emergency response, no upgrades. The Kelp DAO hack last week shows what happens when bridges CAN'T be paused - $292M gone. Toly's approach works for simple protocols but scales terribly for anything complex enough to have bugs you haven't found yet.

The “$10B total hacks in DeFi” headline sounds extremely bearish at first glance
But looking deeper, the response mechanisms seem very different from a few years ago
For example:
• Volo Protocol (Sui) exploit (\~$3.5M) → team froze part of the funds, protected $28M TVL, and covered user losses themselves
• Arbitrum Security Council reportedly recovered \~$70M linked to the Kelp DAO situation and moved it to a recovery wallet
Two years ago, most exploits ended with funds gone and users left waiting
Now we’re seeing actual recovery, intervention, and accountability at the protocol level
At the same time, large players are still accumulating ETH aggressively, which suggests the market might be pricing risk differently than retail sentiment
So I’m starting to wonder:
Are we still in a “high-risk DeFi” phase…
Or is this slowly becoming a more resilient system than people think?
Curious how you guys see this

ParyonUSD is launching on April 30th. It models Liquity V2 on a L1 UTXO native tokens and smart contracts enabled PoW chain (Bitcoin Cash, since 2023 "CashTokens" upgrade). Even though it's a minority PoW chain it is secure against deep reorgs thanks to 10-block finalization (aka "weak subjectivity").
Here's how it stacks up against the checklist.
**Where does the yield actually come from?**
Borrower interest payments. People deposit BCH as collateral, borrow stablecoins against it at a minimum 110% collateral ratio, and set their own interest rate on the loan. That interest gets paid in BCH and distributed to stakers in the Stability Pool roughly every 10 days.
No governance token emissions, no recursive looping, no "real yield" that's actually rebranded incentives. Borrowers pay interest → stakers earn interest. One sentence.
**What breaks first if conditions get worse?**
It's modeled on Liquity V2: redemptions hit the lowest-interest-rate loan first, not the lowest collateral ratio. The interest rate itself becomes a market signal for redemption risk. If the peg drops below a dollar: redemptions spike → interest rates get bid up → borrowing gets more expensive → supply tightens → peg recovers. Simultaneously the higher rates mean better staking yield → more demand for the stablecoin. Dual feedback loop, supply-side and demand-side, that self-corrects.
The main honest risk: the price oracle is currently a single signer. The audit flags this explicitly. The system already supports migrating to a multi-sig committee without redeployment, but at launch it's centralized on that one point. Worth knowing.
**How clean is the exit if I change my mind?**
You get a receipt token when you stake, hand it back to withdraw your full stake plus your pro-rata share of accumulated BCH earnings. No partial withdrawal complexity. They stripped that out during the audit process to keep things clean. Withdrawals also account for any liquidations that happened while you were staked, so you get proportionally fewer tokens back if the pool spent funds liquidating bad loans. Straightforward accounting, no surprises.
**Liquidity**
It hasn't launched yet (April 30th). Expect liquidity to be thin at first. BCH's DeFi ecosystem is much smaller than Ethereum's. The mechanism is clean but the surrounding liquidity environment is early stage so don't expect thick DEX books on day one.
**Fixed vs floating**
Interest rates aren't set by a DAO vote or an algorithm with magic parameters. Each borrower picks their own rate and the market sorts it out through the redemption mechanism. Centrally planned interest rates are how you get MakerDAO-style rate shocks where the DSR jumps from 5% to 15% because eight people voted on a Thursday. Here, rates are emergent.
**Protocol quality**
Modeled after Liquity V2. Audited by Sighash Labs across three passes covering 26 CashScript contract files. Overall posture rated "strong after remediation". One critical finding (interest routing enforcement) and one high finding (redemption oracle slippage protection) were both resolved before final sign-off. Contracts are open source and the team built an automated verification tool so anyone can confirm the deployed bytecode matches the audited source. The audit also recommends a public bug bounty for additional assurance.
**Counterparty / smart contract risk**
BCH is UTXO-architecture, extended in 2023 with CashTokens that let UTXOs carry additional state beyond just satoshis. This means clean state management, straightforward on-chain analytics, and notably it avoids entire classes of MEV that plague EVM chains (no sandwich attacks, no frontrunning the stability pool). The trade-off is a less mature smart contract ecosystem and tooling compared to Solidity/EVM.
One more thing the audit surfaced: a critical bug in the third pass was actually caught by an AI audit tool, not the human reviewers. Make of that what you will, but the fact that they're layering multiple review approaches (manual line-by-line, transaction topology reasoning, and AI passes) is a good sign for a team this early.

This is a useful stress test for L2 governance assumptions. The freeze is technically legitimate under Arbitrum's current DAO structure, but it surfaces an important clarification: 'decentralized' bundles at least three distinct properties — sequencer decentralization, governance decentralization, and censorship resistance — that are often conflated in marketing. Most L2s today are strong on one or two, not all three simultaneously.

**ETH Daily - 22nd April**
* Circle [proposal](https://ethdaily.io/circle-usdc-rate-hike-aave) for Aave
* Road to [Devcon 8 grants](https://ethdaily.io/road-to-devcon-8-academic-program)
* Fluid [extends](https://ethdaily.io/fluid-aweth-redemption-protocol-on-l2) aWETH redemptions to L2
* Shutter PEN DAO [funding model](https://ethdaily.io/shutter-introduces-perpetual-endowment-network-pen)
* Besu 26.4.0 [release](https://x.com/HyperledgerBesu/status/2046984536639021555)
* 200 ETH Security badges [issued](https://x.com/thedaofund/status/2046971022897819900)
* Growthepie [app upgrade](https://x.com/growthepie_eth/status/2046969583391674879)
* Catalysis [live on](https://x.com/0xcatalysis/status/2044053623328649584) Ethereum
* Grantr [prototype](https://github.com/alexanderchopan/grantr) for EIP-8141 frames
* Dan Finlay [leaves](https://x.com/danfinlay/status/2047101119709827580) Consensys
* Base Kipseli [propAMM bug](https://x.com/TheDEFIac/status/2046973478595641435)
* Polymarket [hair dryer](https://x.com/JeremiahDJohns/status/2047040658506977628) manipulation
* Justin Sun [sues](https://x.com/justinsuntron/status/2046787043557244983) WLFI
Read more: [https://ethdaily.io/931](https://ethdaily.io/931)