MakerDAO founder thinks Curve crash could be last before bull market

MakerDAO co-founder Rune Christensen thinks there might be an upside after a Curve Finance exploit over the weekend trigged widespread worries throughout the world of decentralized finance. 

“This might seems like an 'it’s over' moment, but perhaps it’s just this cycle’s Black Thursday, the last crash before the bull market, with everything coming back [one hundred times] stronger,” he said in a post on Twitter. 

The DeFi protocol Curve Finance saw several of its liquidity pools exploited due to a bug in smart contracts that use versions of the Vyper coding language. Attackers extracted $24 million by draining several stablecoin pools using Vyper contracts as a result of a re-entrancy vulnerability. 

Several leaders in blockchain took to Twitter to describe the long-term implications of the exploit.

"Can also be a pivotal moment, where lending protocols finally start proactive monitoring of on-chain liquidity for each onboarded collateral type," Nostra founder David Garai posted in response to Christensen's comment.

Aave founder weighs in

Aave founder and CEO Stani Kulechov also posted comments to Twitter, trying to make sense of what has happened to Curve.

“Yesterday was an unfortunate setback for Curve and DeFi," he said. "Curve's team is one of the best in the space and I would expect nothing less than coming out strong in due course.” 

“Building resilient DeFi is extremely hard … While the damage was limited and seems something what the Curve community would be able to handle, on the positive note, many of the exploits were front-ran but MEV bots that are also returning funds to Curve,” he continued.

Hernán Yellati, Head of Global Macro Research at crypto research firm CTF Capital, said in an email that the exploit event could have two different edges.

"On the one hand, it can be seen as a bottom for Defi, leaving significant upside ahead," he said. "On the other hand, it may cast some shadows on possible contagion among other Defi protocols."