Original | Odaily Planet Daily(@OdailyChina)
Author | Azuma(@azuma_eth)
“I believe all DeFi is now unsafe.”
This assertion left by OpenZeppelin founder Manuel Aráoz on X yesterday, like a depth charge, once again rocked the already stagnant DeFi market.
Manuel even stated that he has started advising friends and family to withdraw funds from major DeFi protocols, including blue-chip protocols like Aave, MakerDAO, and Compound, which were once considered low-risk.
This is not alarmism from an outsider. On the contrary, Manuel himself is one of the core builders of the DeFi security system, and OpenZeppelin is one of the industry's most mainstream security auditing firms. Its contract libraries, security standards, and audit frameworks have permeated nearly the entire DeFi world.
The reason for Manuel's complete shift in attitude lies in AI. Manuel pessimistically believes that the ability of AI Coding Agents to identify and exploit smart contract vulnerabilities is increasing exponentially.
This means that issues which previously required top-tier white-hat teams weeks to discover might now be scanned by AI in minutes; where hackers once needed long-term study of protocol logic, attack paths can now be analyzed automatically by AI; the "open and transparent" nature of DeFi, once an advantage, has now become the best training corpus for attackers.
Manuel also raised a more fatal problem: Smart contract security is essentially an extremely asymmetric game — the defense must patch all vulnerabilities, while the attacker only needs to find one to steal funds. As AI begins to exponentially enhance attack efficiency, this asymmetry is rapidly becoming unbalanced.
The Cold Reality: DeFi Has Become a Cash Cow for Hackers
Looking back at DeFi security incidents over the past few months, you'll find that Manuel's concerns are not exaggerated.
April was almost the worst month in DeFi's history.
- On April 1st, April Fool's Day, Drift Protocol lost $280 million due to manager privilege hijacking and multi-signature execution vulnerabilities (details in "An April Fool's Joke? Drift Protocol Hacked for Over $280M, Potentially Becoming Solana Ecosystem's Second-Largest DeFi Heist").
- Subsequently, on April 19th, Kelp DAO lost $292 million due to a bridge protocol breach (details in "DeFi Hacked Again for $292M, Is Even Aave Unsafe Now?"). The hacker later escaped via lending protocols like Aave, casting the shadow of bad debt and its cascading effects over the entire DeFi sector.
Entering May, incidents not only didn't decrease but further proliferated.
- On May 15th, THORChain was attacked. A newly joined node operator exploited a vulnerability in the GG20 Threshold Signature Scheme (TSS), reconstructed the vault private key, and directly executed outbound transactions, causing over $10 million in losses.
- On May 18th, Verus's bridge protocol was attacked. The attacker forged cross-chain import payloads, bypassed verification to extract assets from the Ethereum reserve, stealing approximately $11.58 million.
- On May 19th, Echo Protocol on Monad was attacked due to a private key leak. The attacker minted 1,000 eBTC (worth $76.7 million) and extracted funds via Curvance using a previously tested attack path.
- On May 24th, StablR, a compliant stablecoin issuer under the MiCA regulatory framework, was attacked. The hacker profited over $2.8 million by minting EURR and USDR, causing EURR and USDR to depeg.
- On May 25th, the SquidRouter module was attacked, resulting in approximately $3 million in assets stolen from 86 Gnosis Safe wallets.
- On May 27th, the StakeDAO deployer private key was leaked on Arbitrum. The attacker minted about 5.45 trillion vsdCRV and exchanged part of it for 43.7 ETH to escape.
The frequently occurring security incidents have sounded the alarm. DeFi seems to be collapsing across the board, from on-chain code to off-chain management.
AI Has Become the Hackers' Nuclear Weapon
Why has the DeFi offense-defense dynamic suddenly accelerated towards collapse this summer? Beyond the evolution of traditional hacking techniques, the rapid advancement of AI large language models is becoming the ultimate factor tipping the balance.
In the past, finding a complex smart contract vulnerability (especially those involving cross-chain, multi-layer nesting, or extremely hidden reentrancy logic) required top hackers weeks or even months of code review. However, with the maturity of AI agents possessing ultra-long context, strong logical reasoning, and autonomous tool-calling capabilities, this has changed fundamentally.
- Second-Level Scanning and Global "Zero-Day" Vulnerability Mining: Attackers only need to feed the open-source codebase to the new generation of AI reasoning models. The AI can, within seconds, deduce hundreds of extreme interaction scenarios like a seasoned security expert, accurately pinpointing edge cases missed by human auditors during fatigue.
- Automated Attack Script Generation: AI can not only discover vulnerabilities but also automatically write, test, and deploy the "hacker smart contracts" used to extract funds.
- Perfect Orchestration of Off-Chain DevOps and Social Engineering: AI can impersonate perfect developers for phishing or monitor DeFi teams' GitHub commit logs around the clock. Once a team uploads code containing sensitive information or unverified fixes, the AI will launch an attack within seconds—far faster than any human security team's response time.
In this security warfare augmented by AI, hackers, armed with AI, possess nearly infinite ammunition and second-level attack speed. DeFi, however, is constrained by slow-paced governance voting, multi-signature confirmations, and lagging security audits, making it difficult to mount a corresponding defensive response.
Last month, Anthropic, the AI development company behind Claude, officially announced its next-generation model, Mythos (details in "Anthropic Creates the Most Powerful AI Model Ever, But Dares Not Release It..."). This is the first model in human history to break the hundred-trillion parameter threshold (in contrast, mainstream models currently range from hundreds of billions to one trillion parameters), with a staggering training cost of $10 billion.
However, due to Mythos's specialized capabilities in cybersecurity (Anthropic disclosed that using Mythos, they identified thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities in just a few weeks), Anthropic even dares not publicly release the model directly, for fear of malicious use by hacking groups. Instead, they plan to first allow leading large companies to test and preemptively patch potential vulnerabilities through a "Glasswing" initiative.
With the DeFi security situation already so severe at this stage, it's hard to imagine what new threats the industry's security defenses will face once Mythos is publicly released.
The Biggest Problem: Risk-Reward Ratio Has Long Been Unbalanced
For ordinary DeFi participants, liquidity providers (LPs), and whales, the most important question now is to sit down and calculate.
For a long time, the reason users chose to deposit funds into DeFi was to pursue annualized yields several times higher than those in traditional finance. During bull markets or the frenzy of liquidity mining, yields of 10%, 20%, or even higher were enough to cover people's psychological expectations for "potential technical risks."
But today, this underlying logic has long been shaken and even overturned. The risk-reward ratio of DeFi is already unbalanced. On the reward side, as the market enters a game of limited players and safety margins thicken, the real yields of most mainstream, relatively reliable DeFi protocols have fallen back to single-digit ranges. On the risk side, users' principal is exposed to a black box that could be breached by AI at any moment and emptied by a flash loan in an instant. Once a protocol is hacked, token prices plummeting to zero and liquidity pools being drained often happen within minutes, with no legal recourse, insurance, or central bank to provide coverage.
The risk of losing 100% of principal to chase roughly 5% annualized yield is clearly not a good deal.
Manuel's words may be somewhat absolute, but they tear off DeFi's last fig leaf. In the face of the reality where hackers have made AI a conventional weapon and security incidents continue to erupt in the industry, if you are not prepared for the psychological expectation of losing 100% of your principal for a certain yield, then "withdrawing funds as soon as possible and realizing profits" might be the most rational and risk-control-principled choice in the current market cycle.
