When the excrement hit the air conditioning

I took off most of April. April was a terrible month for DeFi and crypto and I had my own life things happening that sucked away my time and energy. Final biz tax prep, mother in law moving in from a care facility and to round out the month…Covid ripped through our house. It was all inline for a shitshow of a month across the board. Where do we currently stand with DeFi? After the Drift hack, I pulled some positions personally out of DeFi to cold storage that hasn’t touched DeFi. I’m waiting it out a bit, but have faith in the future.

Although the excrement hit the air conditioning, sometimes it takes a fire to clear the path for fresh growth and transformation. We are seeing a massive response from the Solana ecosystem after the Drift hack that shows signs of doubling down and tightening security. Squads, Kamino, Jupiter, Project 0 and others are stepping up to the plate. Meanwhile, we are seeing protocols fall, like DeFi Carrot (I was a user of theirs).

April 2026 saw a record number of crypto hacks/exploits, with trackers reporting 28–40 incidents depending on scope (DeFi-focused vs. broader crypto hacks).

DefiLlama reports 28–30 separate exploits across protocols, chains, and apps. Total losses = approximately $625M.

PeckShield (reports on broader security alerts covering hacks/exploits) reports 40 major hacks totaling almost $650M (a 1,140% increase from March). 28/40 were in DeFi.

Two attacks accounted for the vast majority (90%) of losses

Drift Protocol (Solana) — $285M (April 1 - social engineering/admin key compromise, linked to North Korean actors).

Kelp DAO (Ethereum/multi-chain, via LayerZero bridge) — $293M (mid-April - bridge message spoofing).

What’s happening in the markets?

Nothing. It’s so clear from data that we are trapped under $80k Bitcoin. We rode up to $79.5k and instantly dropped back down. On Saturday, we spiked up above $79k, then right back down. It’s a tradfi sell wall keeping us from going above $80k and it’s similar tight ranges forcing SOL and ETH as well. The only people making money are the ones able to trade in size on a 1-2% move.

Unclear Clarity

Gotta love that the mark up of CLARITY provided no clarity and everyone’s confused. Only in government can you celebrate obfuscation of rules. I haven’t seen one person lay out clearly what it means for yields on stables. Even Ai seems confused by its vagueness. Brian Armstrong claimed it’s a win, but you can’t get yield on held funds, but can if it’s “active”, but no one knows what that means. Usual legalese double speak scenario.

Finding Satoshi is worth watching

The “Finding Satoshi” documentary came out and it’s actually worth watching! I enjoyed watching it and grabbed the discounted rate through coinbase. I’m one of those people that ultimately doesn’t care “who” satoshi is. I have immense respect for the cypherpunks, pgp, Hal, Len and everyone involved back then. Check out my origins of cypherpunk articles.

The documentary does a good job of respecting and focusing on the work and ideals that brought bitcoin into existence and not about an overly dramatized mystery gotcha reveal.

They make a compelling case. The documentary doesn't change anything for me, but was a great reminder of why I'm here. Seeing Fran Finney in it was really heart warming. Hal and Len left a legacy worth studying whether they collaborated to create bitcoin or not.

Kamino keeps building

Kamino posted a teaser that they are bringing a new product that provides regulated yield from institutional demand. After all the hacks, I think we will see more products like this rolling out.

Squads Triples Down

Squads launches 3 new open-source Solana Multisig tools for v4.

It reduces supply-chain risk with tiny, auditable codebases with minimal dependencies (easy to review the entire binary). Eliminating blind signing. You can directly decode and inspect every instruction before approving, instead of trusting a single UI.

Breaking single points of failure. Self-host your own verifier/CLI/monitor or use independent instances run by unrelated security teams.

Defense-in-depth. Inspect (CLI), verify (browser), monitor (alerts) across multiple independent tools. Never rely on one frontend.

Bottom line: Makes high-value multisig operations much harder to compromise through compromised frontends, malicious updates, or hidden instructions. Strongly recommended for any team managing real money or governance.

DeFi United steps up to help Aave

Post Kelp Dao hack, Aave got put into a situation with a lot of bad debt and not only did EVM companies come out to help, the Solana Foundation also lent $USDT into Aave. Where was everyone when it came to helping Drift? Are rsETH holders being made whole?

Sounds more like DeFi United is propping up Aave because of the major downwind issues that would happen.

Who owns the ETH?

Speaking of the Kelp hack, funds frozen on Arbitrum ($70m) were set to go up to a vote to compensate victims, but lawyers smacked a restraining order on the funds. Is it for the victims of the hack? No. It represents family members of people killed in a DPRK-backed terrorist attack years ago and they are seeking compensation.

Their argument is that money belongs to the DPRK and should go to these victim’s family members (not tied to this hack at all). Arbitrum is stuck in the middle now. The NY court is saying not to move anything until it’s resolved. Total craziness.

DeFi Carrot gets chomped at the roots

DeFi Carrot is shutting down. In their own words, “This is certainly not the outcome we wanted, but the situation with the Drift exploit has proven to be catastrophic for our continued operations.” I liked their approach and used Carrot. If you have funds in there, get them out.

• May 14th is the deadline to withdraw any remaining funds from Boost, Turbo, and CRT before we will then begin to deleverage the system. Your deposited funds are still yours, but all leverage will be reduced to zero, freeing up all liquidity for CRT redemption

Pump.wtf

Pump Fun decided to burn $370M of $PUMP this week. It briefly moved the chart 10% up, which instantly retracted and managed to do nothing. Remember the $PUMP airdrop to users? Never happened. I personally wouldn’t qualify for it, but what the heck are they doing over there? Although $370 million worth sounds really impressive, had they tried to sell it into the market, they would have maybe gotten $5-6 million trying to swap it because of the price impact it would have had.

Meta tests a roll out of USDC on Solana

Meta this week rolled out the ability for creators to get paid in $USDC on Solana. The most shocking thing is that there are creators getting paid on Facebook, although my 80 yr old Mom does follow some content creators there who surely are accepting $USDC. Any win is a win, but it's only in Colombia and the Philippines currently.

Megaturd?

Megaeth had their TGE for $MEGA this week and the once savior of ETH according to KOLs seems to be flopping a bit, but it’s still early. It ran up to $0.17 for a hot second, but is currently sitting around $0.12.

Their listing on Binance caused drama on the timeline as people pointed to them paying Binance for the listing, while Megaeth says things like…we didn’t give them any MEGA, but they could have given them dollars and still be kinda telling the truth. No one believes they got listed out of good will. That’s not how Binance rolls.

Watching the paint dry

Until we meaningfully break $80k and rip towards $85k and beyond $BTC, we remain watching the paint dry.

Stay Free • Ebullition