DeFi Trust Crisis Intensifies: Tens of Billions in Funds Withdraw, Shifting to Compliant Stablecoins and Tokenized Treasuries

According to BroadChain, at 23:00 on April 21, the theft of $292 million worth of rsETH from KelpDAO became the final straw that broke market confidence. Following the approximately $285 million exploit of Drift Protocol on April 1 and the bad debt incident of the Venus protocol in March, the DeFi sector recorded an outflow of about $10 billion over the weekend. This series of security incidents has exposed risks far beyond the smart contract code level. Chainalysis analysis pointed out that the Drift incident stemmed from privilege abuse, administrator pre-signature vulnerabilities, and false collateral assets, highlighting deep-seated issues in governance, signature mechanisms, and operational architecture. The Venus protocol suffered a loss of approximately $14.9 million due to inflated collateral asset values, also revealing structural risks under weak liquidity. TRM's 2026 report confirmed that infrastructure attacks have become the primary cause of industry losses. Market funds are accelerating their flow to safer and more compliant areas: the combined total market capitalization of USDT and USDC is approximately $263 billion, the scale of tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds has reached $10.93 billion, with over 55,000 holders. Visa disclosed that its annualized monthly settlement volume of USDC has exceeded $3.5 billion and predicts that 2026 will be the inaugural year for institutional deployment of stablecoins. CryptoSlate analysis indicates that compliant institutions are competing for an on-chain capital pool exceeding $330 billion. While native DeFi is not dead, its core position as the default gateway for on-chain finance is being squeezed. Open composability is increasingly playing the role of an innovation lab, and the driving force of the next growth wave is shifting toward products with clear logic, sufficient collateral, and institutional compatibility.