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Aave dips amid BGD Labs announcing it will cease contributions

“Their departure is the most significant talent loss in Aave’s history.”

2/20/26 12:26PM

Aave, the largest on-chain lending protocol, is losing one of its longest-tenure service providers, Bored Ghosts Developing (BGD) Labs.

After four years of nearly exclusive contribution to the lending protocol, with $25.8 billion in total value locked, BGD Labs announced Friday it will not renew its engagement with Aave’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) in April, citing centralization concerns with Aave Labs, headed by the protocol’s founder, Stani Kulechov.

Governed by its DAO, the protocol is steered by token holders and various service providers such as Aave Labs, BGD Labs, Aave Chain Initiative, and Chaos Labs, as well as other organizations and individuals.

The departure of BGD Labs is concerning for every token holder, according to Marc Zeller, founder of service provider Aave Chan Initiative. “The DAO’s biggest engineering contributor felt they couldn’t keep building. Their departure is the most significant talent loss in Aave’s history,” Zeller told Sherwood News.

Omer Goldberg, founder of risk management firm Chaos Labs, also said Aave’s dominant position in the market is directly tied to BGD Labs’ work. “This is a new chapter for Aave, but it’s hard to ignore that core contributors felt there was no path forward under the new guard,” Goldberg said to Sherwood.

“Badly executed” pivot

BGD Labs’ departure stems from Aave’s pivot from an independent company building several products to a more central contributor within the ecosystem with the upcoming rollout of v4.

BGD Labs said, “While this pivot is totally legitimate and potentially positive to overall Aave, we believe the way of addressing it has been badly executed: Aave Labs believes that the whole Aave DAO and contributors should pivot in the direction they believe in, without sufficient consideration of existing contributors’ expertise.”

BGD Labs highlighted difficulty in overcoming centralization issues with Aave Labs, which has control of branding channels and substantial power to influence governance votes. “We stop contributing because the environment no longer aligns with how we operate and where we see our value,” BGD Labs wrote.

Departing after previous proposal on branding ownership

The announcement comes about two months after a controversial governance vote that ended on Christmas. The proposal, authored by BGD Labs founder Ernesto Boado, centered on token holders receiving control of the protocol’s brand assets, such as domains, social handles, and naming rights.

The December vote was contentious after Aave Labs escalated the proposal despite the holiday season being “one of the worst windows for a high-stakes governance vote” and Boado and other members expressing frustration over a lack of open discussion.

The proposal to change brand ownership did not pass, with 41.2% of votes abstaining, though Aave Labs’ Kulechov voted nay, arguing that the “proposal takes us in a direction that is not good for the Aave ecosystem. It forces a complex legal and operational issue into a simple yes/no, empty payload vote with no clear path forward.”

The ordeal saw the token’s price drop from nearly 20% from the initial proposal to the end of the vote, shedding more than $702 million in the cryptocurrency’s market capitalization.

Sage D. Young4/2/26

Solana drops to price not seen since February as Drift exploit rattles sentiment

Solana has historically seen its largest price declines on Thursdays, and today is no exemption as the crypto industry reels from the over $270 million exploit that occurred yesterday on Drift, a trading venue native to the solana blockchain.

The price of solana has decreased 5.5% to around $78, a level not seen since February, data from CoinGecko shows.

Drift was one of the largest protocols on the solana network by total value locked, which now sits at nearly $245 million. The total value locked on solana has shrunk by nearly $1 billion since the incident, per DefiLlama.

Exploit likely involved from social engineering

The attack, which has turned into a wider contagion event, is unsettling for those in the industry. It did not come from a bug in the protocol’s smart contracts or programs. “Humans remain the bottleneck,” Mert Mumtaz, cofounder and CEO of solana development firm Helius, said in response to the incident.

The exploit involved unauthorized transaction approvals likely facilitated through social engineering. The sophisticated operation “appears to have involved multi-week preparation and staged execution,” the team said on Thursday.

Omer Goldberg, founder of risk management firm Chaos Labs, added, “The DeFi [decentralized finance] ecosystem continues to grow in scale, but not in operational security.”

“Protocols now have custody of hundreds of millions in user funds while depending on admin key setups that would be considered unacceptable in TradFi for a fraction of that AUM [assets under management],” Goldberg wrote on X.

“Most hacks come down to the simple act of one clicking a link they shouldn’t have clicked. These are picking up in pace, be extra cautious clicking any link or file,” continued Helius’ Mumtaz.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

4/2/26

Optimism around bitcoin’s trajectory is fading following Trump’s address, as whales continue to offload

Bitcoin has been stuck in a narrow range for the past few weeks, seemingly incapable of breaking in either direction.

People walk past an advertisement feature Donald Trump with...

$270M

Sage D. Young4/1/26

April 1 is known as a day for funny pranks. However, a popular trading venue on the solana blockchain, Drift, is suffering from an ongoing exploit today, on-chain data shows.

“Drift Protocol is experiencing an active attack. Deposits and withdrawals have been suspended. We are coordinating with multiple security firms, bridges, and exchanges to contain the incident. This is not an April Fools joke,” the team said on social media at 2:58 p.m. ET.

TheBlock reported the exploit is at least $200 million, while blockchain sleuth Lookonchain estimates the figure is $270 million. It could be even more. At this range, the Wednesday hack is among the largest ever, according to the exploits ranking dashboard from Rekt.

Drift’s exploit is concerning for those within the crypto industry. Solana treasury firm DeFi Development Corp. allocates a portion of its balance to on-chain strategies to generate yield, including Drift, though the firm announced it had no exposure to the protocol and “was not impacted by an alleged exploit affecting the platform,” per its press release.

Drift also provides to qualified users sACRED, a derivative token of a tokenized feeder fund that is linked to Apollo Global Management Inc.’s traditional Diversified Credit Fund.

Sage D. Young

4/1/26

Google Research: Quantum computers a “serious threat” to 6.7 million bitcoin, including Satoshi’s coins

“Their fast-clock architecture could crack a private key in 9 minutes, while bitcoin blocks take 10 minutes on average. That changes the threat model entirely.”