Aave to overhaul collateral and listing standards after KelpDAO exploit

The lending giant is expanding its asset listing criteria beyond financial risk to include cybersecurity and architecture, and wants the rest of DeFi to follow. What to know : Aave will assess all future collateral assets on cybersecurity, interoperability, and technical architecture — not just price volatility — and will publish a minimum-standards playbook for issuers seeking to list on the protocol. The changes follow April's KelpDAO bridge exploit, in which an attacker minted $293 million in unbacked rsETH tokens and used them as collateral on Aave, leaving the protocol with hundreds of millions in bad debt. Rather than a government rescue, DeFi self-organised through an industry coalition called "DeFi United" to plug the gap — a response Jeng compared favourably to the government-led bank bailouts of 2008.