DeFi
Insights and advancements at the advent of decentralized finance.
Flash Loan Attacks Drained $1.2B From DeFi Between 2020 and 2024: Study
Flash loan attacks drained $1.211 billion from decentralized finance platforms between February 2020 and July 2024, according to newly published research in the Journal of Financial Crime. The study, by Professor Tim Hall of the University of Winchester and Remo Stieger, a former partner at Swiss risk intelligence firm SyntiFi, identified 72 flash loan attacks among 254 successful attacks on DeFi over the period. Those 254 attacks caused $6.568 billion in losses, 18.44% of which came from flash...
Aug 13, 2026
DeFi
Ethereum DeFi Platform Ether.fi Adds Tokenized Stocks and Portfolio-Backed Loans
Ether.fi, a decentralized finance platform known for Ethereum staking, is adding tokenized asset trading, portfolio-backed loans, and fiat accounts to its self-custodial app. Announced on Thursday, Ether.fi said users can now trade tokenized stocks, metals, and crypto assets through its app. An integrated market using decentralized lending protocol Aave on Optimism, an Ethereum scaling network, also lets users lend assets, borrow against their portfolios without selling their holdings, and send...
Aug 12, 2026
DeFi
Harmony's ONE Sinks 37% After Attacker Mints 4 Billion Tokens
Layer-1 blockchain Harmony has confirmed it was exploited after an attacker minted roughly 4 billion ONE tokens without authorisation, sending the token down 37% to about $0.00077, per CoinGecko data. On-chain analyst Juiceberg flagged the mint early Wednesday, putting it at close to 4 billion tokens, or about 26% of the supply, and saying the tokens had been created through empty blocks. Around 2.8 billion were funnelled onto exchanges as the price fell. In a follow-up tweet, the analyst said...
Aug 7, 2026
DeFi
Tokenized Asset Deposits Tripled to $7.4B as DeFi Shrank: CoinShares
Deposits of tokenized real-world assets into decentralized lending platforms and exchanges more than tripled over the past year, climbing from $2.3 billion to $7.4 billion, while total deposits across DeFi fell by approximately 15%. The figures come from The Growth of Hybrid Finance, published Thursday by asset manager CoinShares and on-chain data provider Token Terminal. It is the pair's second joint report, covering the second quarter of 2025 through the second quarter of 2026, with all data s...
Aug 3, 2026
DeFi
XRP Holders Can Now Borrow Ripple's RLUSD on Ethereum Without Selling Their Crypto
XRP holders can now borrow Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin against their holdings on Ethereum without selling their tokens after Flare's FXRP was approved as collateral in Sentora's RLUSD Main vault. Announced on Monday by layer 1 blockchain developer Flare, the integration lets users convert XRP into Flare's FXRP token, bridge it to Ethereum, deposit it as collateral on the Morpho lending protocol, and borrow RLUSD. Because the loan is backed by collateral rather than a sale, borrowers retain exposur...
Jul 28, 2026
DeFi
1inch's Shared Liquidity Layer Aqua Goes Live
1inch has opened Aqua, its shared DeFi liquidity layer, to all users, eight months after releasing it to developers only. "he protocol went live on Tuesday across 13 EVM chains, among them Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, BNB Chain and Robinhood Chain. A front end had originally been slated for the first quarter. Billed as "the foundation for scalable, capital-efficient DeFi," Aqua works as a registry rather than a pool. A provider approves a token balance and creates positions that draw on it. Tokens...