Aave's founder defends the $8.45 billion run on the bank, and the V4 upgrade aims to restructure the risk management system

According to CoinDesk, in April this year, the cross-chain bridge KelpDAO based on LayerZero suffered an attack of $292 million, triggering a deposit run of up to $8.45 billion in the DeFi lending protocol Aave within 48 hours. In response to external doubts about the protocol's risk control capabilities, Aave founder and CEO Stani Kulechov stated that this incident precisely proves Aave's "resilience."

Kulechov stated at the Proof of Talk conference in Paris that Aave V3 has withstood multiple market cycles and remains stable even in extreme market conditions. He believes that recent DeFi security incidents mainly stem from third-party infrastructure rather than vulnerabilities in the protocol's own smart contracts.

However, according to risk analysis firm LlamaRisk, the attacker exploited a vulnerability in KelpDAO to mint worthless collateral and deposited it into Aave, subsequently withdrawing real wETH, resulting in approximately $123.7 million in bad debt for Aave V3. To address the crisis, Aave DAO urgently allocated 25,000 ETH, and Kulechov personally injected an additional 5,000 ETH, with a total rescue scale of about $300 million.

In response to the exposed systemic risks, Aave is planning to restructure its risk management framework through the V4 upgrade. The new version will adopt a modular "Hub-and-Spoke" design, replacing the traditional liquidity pool model, allowing the protocol to implement independent risk pricing for different collateral types and freeze specific collateral assets before risk spreads, thereby reducing the likelihood of chain reactions triggered by cross-chain bridge failures.