The decentralized finance sector has faced sharp criticism following a $20 billion drop in total value locked (TVL) and $1.1 billion lost to hacks, including a $292 million Kelp DAO bridge exploit. Manuel Aráoz, former CTO and co-founder of OpenZeppelin, argued this week that DeFi is increasingly vulnerable as AI becomes more capable at finding exploits. “DeFi is dead,” declared one commentator on X.
Andrew Forson, president of DeFi Technologies, takes the opposite view. “DeFi is way more than those protocols that have been hacked,” Forson told CoinDesk. “Those who don’t know that are suffering from deep ignorance.”
Forson pointed to the stablecoin layer as evidence of DeFi’s underlying strength, referencing recent discussion at the Digital Money Summit in London. “The elephant in the room is that you have Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC, and it’s working pretty much perfectly. Everybody else is trying to recreate that.”
On the stablecoin front, Forson cited significant institutional adoption. “Stablecoins at the end of 2025 held over $150 billion in U.S. Treasuries — more than Saudi Arabia, more than Germany in terms of their central banks and governments,” he said. The Bank for International Settlements reported stablecoin holdings in U.S. T-bills exceeded $153 billion as of December 2025.
Forson also noted that core stablecoin volumes are growing at 20% to 30% month-over-month. Blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis estimates stablecoins moved more than $35 trillion last year.
On the question of AI-driven hacking threats, Forson drew a distinction between application-layer exploits and core network security. “You haven’t heard of any core hacks to the Bitcoin or Ethereum networks. You haven’t heard of any core hacks to Circle’s USDC or Tether’s USDT.”
He also reframed blockchain transparency as a security asset rather than a liability. “When something goes wrong, everybody sees it, everybody talks about it and they fix it,” Forson said, contrasting this with traditional finance, where he argued systemic errors can go undetected for years.
Source: DeFi Technologies exec pushes back on ‘DeFi is dead’ narrative