The decentralized finance (DeFi) industry has been hit by recent criticism and negative commentary following a $20 billion drop in total value locked (TVL) and a $1.1 billion loss from hacks like the $292 million Kelp DAO bridge exploit.
DeFi is no longer secure because AI is becoming “superhuman” at hacking, former OpenZeppelin CTO and co-founder Manuel Aráoz said this week. “DeFi is dead,” a commenter on X recently said.
Andrew Forson, president of DeFi Technologies, has a completely opposite view and some critics of his own: “DeFi is so much more than these protocols that have been hacked,” Forson said in an interview with CoinDesk. “Those who do not know suffer from profound ignorance.”
“We attended a conference where people are talking a lot about central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and centralized bank money.” he added, referring to the recent Digital Money Summit in London. “But the problem is you have Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC, and it works pretty much perfectly. Everyone is trying to recreate that.”
Forson said mainstream finance and security scaremongers vastly overestimate localized code exploits to score reputation points against decentralized networks, completely missing the historic milestones happening right under their noses.
While an $11 million bridge failure immediately grabs headlines, the absolute heart of the DeFi sector, the stable base layer, is seeing unprecedented institutional adoption. “By the end of 2025, stablecoins held over $150 billion in U.S. Treasuries,” Forson revealed. “It’s more than Saudi Arabia. It’s more than Germany in terms of central banks and governments. All of these treasuries are used to back currencies and stablecoins that are primarily used in DeFi.”
Stablecoins held positions in U.S. Treasuries exceeding $153 billion as of December 2025, according to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).
Expanding volumes
Far from being a collapsing ecosystem, Forson pointed out that stablecoin core volumes are growing at a rate of 20-30% month over month.
Blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis estimates that stablecoins moved more than $35 trillion last year, a figure that is expected to reach between $730 trillion and more than a quadrillion dollars by 2035.
Additionally, the network security layer remains completely untouched by “superhuman” hackers spurred by security companies. “You haven’t heard of any major hacks of the Bitcoin or Ethereum networks,” Forson noted. “You haven’t heard of any major hacks of Circle’s USDC or Tether’s USDT.”
While security officials view the open source transparency of blockchain code as a fatal handicap in the AI era, Forson turns the argument on its head: chain clarity is actually DeFi’s ultimate defense mechanism.
“One of the benefits of the whole DeFi space is transparency,” Forson explained. “When something goes wrong, everyone sees it, everyone talks about it and fixes it.”
He compared this with traditional banking, where systemic errors can remain hidden in “private compartments” for years before a corporate auditor notices or makes public a violation.
Wall Street embraces crypto
Recalling the historic collapses of companies like Enron, Forson noted that financial systems have always had to put safeguards in place after market shocks – just as Wall Street introduced automated provisions for inventory losses after the 1987 crash.
The fact that DeFi operates continuously – 24 hours a day, 365 days a week – means that flaws in the protocol are exposed, stress-tested, and fixed continuously, exponentially, faster than in any banking system behind closed doors.
“Toddlers learn to walk by falling,” Forson said, reminding critics that the entire blockchain space is only 16 years old. “There will always be people, entities and technologies that make mistakes or push the boundaries. But that doesn’t mean you completely shut down this entire area of finance.”
Forson concluded by saying that “if Wall Street players don’t participate in this space now, they will lose market share, because others will.”
However, the fact is that Wall Street is working to tokenize the entire stock market and major financial institutions including Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, JPMorgan, Charles Schwab have all deployed crypto services in one way or another.
