Nomad | The DeFi Architect

🚨 I don't think people realize how bad things are at @aave right now. All core markets are at 100% utilization, that includes $3 bil in USDT and $2 bil in USDC stuck! That means you CAN'T WITHDRAW your money! A long post on why and how we ended up here. When the rsETH exploit happened and AAVE incurred bad debt, whales like Justin Sun, MEXC exchange, and others immediately withdrew billions from AAVE. This instantly drained all available liquidity in key core markets like ETH, USDT, USDC and so on. Those first to withdraw got out, laggers got trapped. Initially, the ETH market hit 100% utilization, meaning you could not withdraw your ETH from AAVE. Worse, this also means the protocol can't process ETH liquidations should ETH price fall/crash. If you can't sell any ETH, you can't liquidate to cover debt obligations. That means the risk of more bad debt incurred by AAVE is increasing the longer its markets remain stuck. Nevertheless, users can still sell at a minor loss the aETHwETH tokens on Uniswap or similar aggregators. That exit door is the last one remaining for ETH depositors on AAVE. The same cannot be said by depositors of USDT and USDC. They are stuck. That's because AAVE lost over $6 billion in liquidity in the past 24h. As whales took out their money, USDT and USDC also hit 100% utilization. These markets are now also stuck with money locked. Panic is spreading and desperate times call for desperate measures. Some users decided to borrow against USDT/USDC and exit via other markets at a 10-25% loss (90-75% LTV). Basically you borrow GHO/DAI/USDe against your locked USDT/C. But as more liquidity leaves AAVE, more markets get to 100% utilization and get locked/stuck due to low liquidity. This is quickly cascading across all available markets. Luckily the crypto market was rather flat today so liquidation risks were marginal, but if things change there are billions in stablecoins and other assets locked on AAVE that can't process liquidations = more bad debt for AAVE. If users or related protocols that are stuck need access to their money to prevent liquidations or other critical function, they have a huge problem on their hands. Plus, nobody wants to deposit (or provide liquidity) in these markets now since your ETH, BTC, USDC/T could be stuck there for who know how long. As soon as any available liquidity is made available, it is instantly taken out by bots fighting to get out. As I wrote this I saw 250k in liquidity on USDC vanish in seconds. Then there is the bad debt question. There's over $200 mil in bad debt incurred by AAVE via rsETH that's like a hot potato. Nobody knows who will eventually pay this bill. If you didn't remove your assets from AAVE, you risk receiving at least part of that bill in some form. Not having access to your money is part of that risk too. Contagion is also extremely high. Many protocols and apps rely on AAVE for their earn mechanics. These protocols and their users are stuck too and may be forced to incur bad debt with no fault of their own. October 10th was a CEX driven crash, this is a DeFi risk mitigation failure of epic proportions. AAVE should have never onboarded rsETH as a collateral asset, at least not to the size of hundreds of millions that allowed the hacker to walk away (i.e. borrow) over $200M in ETH after posting fake collateral. Rumors on X are saying rsETH was onboarded by AAVE due to a conflict of interest (lobbying) by a given service provider. If true, this is a major failure of its governance structure (nothing new). The folks at @KelpDAO who manage rsETH also have a tough decision to make on who will actually pay for the $200M exploit. AAVE users? L2 rsETH users? Everyone affected gets a haircut to account for the loss? The AAVE team and its founder, Stani, have been quiet for over 20h since the exploit after initially announcing the rsETH market freeze. They have a pretty big problem on their hands since the whole protocol is at risk right now. Trust is already lost as AAVE is bleeding billions in TVL to the level of hitting 100% utilization on all core markets. Maybe some key actors in the space will step in to provide liquidity to stabilize the markets on AAVE before this gets even worse. I got lucky to get out of AAVE early when I first saw this. I also removed all assets from DeFi and will not touch any protocol in the next few weeks. Too much risk for a few percentage points in yield. If you found this informative, like, share, and follow @duonine