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Circle Ventures’ purchase of Aave’s $AAVE token is being framed as “direct support for DeFi infrastructure.”The move lands days after Aave absorbed fallout from a $293M KelpDAO exploit and over $170M in bad debt.The deal comes as Circle positions itself around a looming U.S. stablecoin bill that could reshape its core USDC business.

Mantle proposed a 30,000 ETH loan to help Aave cover bad debt from Kelp’s exploit.The loan would use Mantle Treasury funds and carry yield based on Lido staking APR.Aave would secure the facility with revenue and at least $11M worth of AAVE tokens.

Over $606 million was stolen from crypto protocols across 12 incidents in the first 18 days of April 2026, according to DefiLlama data.Two attacks, the $285 million Drift Protocol exploit and the $292 million KelpDAO breach, account for approximately 95% of April’s losses.April’s total is already 3.7 times larger than the entire first quarter’s combined losses of $165.5 million, with the month not yet over.

Vercel has confirmed it was compromised after a member of a hacking forum put the company’s information up for sale for $2 million.

The Aave token fell nearly 20% to $89.5 in just over 24 hours as users withdrew billions of dollars from the lending protocol.

After attackers drained $291 million in crypto from Kelp DAO-linked infrastructure, DeFi users struggled on Aave to withdraw funds.

One of the largest decentralized finance (DeFi) exploits of 2026 took place on Saturday..

An attacker seemingly drained 116,500 rsETH from Kelp DAO’s LayerZero-powered cross-chain bridge on Saturday, worth approximately $292 million at current market prices.Kelp’s emergency pauser multisig froze the protocol’s core contracts roughly 46 minutes after the successful drain, blocking two follow-up attempts.Neither Kelp nor parent protocol KernelDAO have publicly acknowledged the incident as of publication.Aave responded by freezing rsETH markets on Aave V3 and V4 and said any potential bad debt could be offset with Umbrella assets.This is a developing story.

AAVE price is trading at $91.02 on April 9, effectively flat on the session, as the $100 psychological level confirms its role as resistance following the intraday crash to $83.92 on April 6.The 4H Supertrend (10,3) is bearish at $87.36 and the MACD histogram is printing a deeply negative 0.85, with no reversal signal visible on either indicator.The next key support sits at $77.97; a break below it opens the $51.38 structural floor, while a daily close above $100 invalidates the bearish setup.

Decentralized lending giant Aave's native token fell near a 2-year-low price following news that another ecosystem contributor is leaving.

DeFi risk manager Chaos Labs said Aave’s planned migration to Aave V4 introduced risks that it wasn’t willing to assume, while Aave said Chaos wanted to take on full control as the sole risk service provider.

Aave has launched V4 on Ethereum mainnet, introducing a “hub-and-spoke” architecture aimed at real‑world asset (RWA) collateral and institutional structured credit markets.news.The protocol, which secures more than $24 billion in total value locked (TVL), is positioning V4 as core infrastructure for regulated RWA pipelines and on‑chain credit products rather than purely speculative leverage.V4 debuts with three liquidity hubs—Core, Prime and Plus—that route credit to specialized “spokes,” allowing bespoke risk policies without fragmenting Aave’s pooled liquidity.governance.

Tokenization startup Midas's Series A round was led by RRE and Creandum to scale an “instant liquidity layer” for onchain yield products.

ECB research finds large percentages of DeFi governance tokens are tied to exchanges and protocol-linked wallets, making it hard to distinguish between usership and actual control.Voting power often sits with a small set of active participants, while many of the most influential voters remain unidentified.

ECB staff paper finds top 100 holders in Aave, MakerDAO, Ampleforth and Uniswap control over 80% of governance tokens.Concentrated voting blocs threaten DeFi protocols’ claims to “fully decentralized” status under MiCA.Findings raise risk that leading DeFi DAOs could be pulled inside the EU’s licensing and compliance regime.

An ECB working paper found DeFi governance remains highly concentrated, complicating efforts to identify who should fall under MiCA oversight.