Category: Business

As pressure on DeFi markets intensifies following the KelpDAO-related exploit crisis, leading industry commentator 0xQuit has issued a noteworthy warning. According to the analyst, the situation on Aave is “bad and getting worse.”

0xQuit stated in its assessment that multiple liquidity pools on Aave had reached 100% utilization. This situation, they explained, was causing lenders to become locked out of the system and exposing the protocol to an additional risk of “bad debt.”

The analyst also argued that lending rates have risen to 10-15%, but this yield is insufficient compared to the risk of financing a potential deficit of approximately $300 million. 0xQuit stated that the biggest uncertainty in the market is who will bear the rsETH losses, adding that the panic could dissipate somewhat once this issue is clarified.

On the other hand, it was noted that the lack of sufficient communication from both Aave and the relevant infrastructure providers (e.g., LayerZero) in the current process has increased uncertainty. 0xQuit stated, “Markets don’t like uncertainty.”

According to the analyst, even with clarity, it will take time for confidence in DeFi, and especially Aave, to return to previous levels following this event. However, if the uncertainty is resolved, the system could resume operation, albeit at lower total value locked (TVL) levels.

*This is not investment advice.

The dead internet is more alive than ever.

A year ago, retailers were debating whether to block AI bots from crawling their websites. That calculation just got a lot harder. New data from Adobe Analytics shows AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites grew 393% in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the same period last year, and shoppers arriving from those sources are now spending more, staying longer, and buying at higher rates than everyone else.

Adobe reported that AI traffic from Q1 2026 grew 393% year over year, with March alone up 269% YoY. “This continues the momentum that was observed during the most recent holiday season (Nov. to Dec. 2025) where AI traffic was up 693% YoY,” the company wrote.

In March 2025, AI traffic converted 38% worse than standard non-AI sources like paid search and email.

This is the opposite of what is happening with the content creation industry. A new UNESCO report found that generative AI is on its way to cause revenue losses of 24% for music creators and 21% for audiovisual creators by 2028.

By March 2026, Adobe reports AI traffic was converting 42% better—a new record, according to the company, which tracks over one trillion visits to U.S. retail sites. Revenue per visit from AI referrals was 37% above non-AI traffic as of last month.

According to Adobe, just one year ago, regular human traffic was worth 128% more.

The engagement data also shows that once a shopper arrives at a retail site via an AI assistant, they spend 48% more time on the page, browse 13% more pages per visit, and show a 12% higher engagement rate than visitors from other channels. “AI is quickly becoming the primary interface between consumers and their favorite brands,” Vivek Pandya, director of Adobe Digital Insights, wrote in the report.

Adobe surveyed more than 5,000 U.S. consumers alongside its traffic data. Thirty-nine percent said they’ve used AI for online shopping, and 85% of that group said it improved their experience. Trust is also climbing: 66% of respondents said they believe AI tools provide accurate results—a figure that helps explain why conversion rates are surging instead of flattening.

AI is serious business

AI traffic is becoming a pretty big deal for service providers who are doing anything they can to control who provides the views and referrals in the ecommerce ecosystem.

Amazon and Perplexity had a spat in federal court over whether AI agents can make purchases on third-party platforms without the platform’s explicit consent. A San Francisco judge issued a preliminary injunction in March blocking Perplexity’s Comet browser from shopping on Amazon after the e-commerce giant argued the agent disguised automated sessions as human browser traffic. Perplexity called Amazon’s legal push “bullying,” arguing that agentic shopping would bring Amazon more transactions, not fewer.

OpenAI launched an “Instant Checkout” feature inside ChatGPT in September 2025. The same month Salesforce estimated that AI agents influenced more than 20% of all global online retail sales during the 2025 holiday season.

Now, with OpenClaw, AI agents can buy things more easily, be it via API connections, MCP servers, skills, integrations, or users activating browser control.

Adobe’s report also flags a structural problem that’s going to matter more as this traffic grows: a significant portion of U.S. retail websites aren’t fully readable by the models generating that traffic.

Homepages scored an average of 75% on Adobe’s AI Content Visibility Checker, meaning roughly a quarter of their content is invisible to LLMs. Individual product pages came in at 66%—a more critical gap, since that’s where purchase decisions happen. The best-performing retailers scored 82.5% on homepage visibility; the lowest-performing hit just 54.2%.

“Consumer adoption of these AI tools is not slowing down,” Adobe wrote, “and businesses need to ensure their digital front doors are optimized for AI to remain relevant in today’s environment.”

McKinsey projects that agentic commerce—AI systems that research, compare, and purchase autonomously—could drive $1 trillion in U.S. retail revenue by 2030, so it’s no wonder why AI companies want to be the ad companies of the agentic era.

Paolo Ardoino, the CEO of Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin firm, has reaffirmed his bullish stance on Bitcoin, sparking reactions as all eyes appear to be on Bitcoin following the recent market rally.

In his post, Ardoino declared that Bitcoin is resistant after a viral artwork shared by Satoshigallery sparked the attention of the crypto community.

The image features a striking human-form statue forged from steel, and the sculpture was shared with a caption that says, “You can bend the steel but not its meaning.”

Although the statement was not extremely clear, Ardoino has related it to Bitcoin’s nature, interpreting the image as a representation of Bitcoin’s resistant nature.

Ardoino stirs debate

Ardoino’s interpretation of the image has received mixed reactions across the crypto community as some commentators agreed that the image is significant in representing Bitcoin’s true nature as being resistant.

However, others have criticized the leading cryptocurrency as some named it as a scam even as Bitcoin continues to show signs of a major recovery.

Nonetheless, the criticism was outweighed by more supportive remarks from other commentators as one user described the piece as one of the most concept-connecting sculptures they had ever seen.

Also, another commentator further stressed that everything else eventually bends, suggesting that Bitcoin endures even in the face of pressure.

Bitcoin stabilizes at $75,000

Ardoino’s bullish comment about Bitcoin has come following a recent price rally that has seen the asset surpass the long-lost $75,000 level.

While this has reignited market optimism, investor confidence is growing stronger, and experts are reaffirming their bullish stance on the asset.

While the rally has cooled and cryptocurrencies are currently showing mixed price action, Bitcoin remains stable around the $75,000 mark.

While the turmoil caused by the KelpDAO-related security vulnerability crisis in the DeFi ecosystem continues, a notable statement came from Justin Sun, a leading figure in the cryptocurrency world.

Sun, in a statement on social media, directly challenged the perpetrator, offering to negotiate. “KelpDAO hacker, how much do you want? Let’s talk. Of course, with the help of KelpDAO,” Sun said, arguing that the situation needed to be resolved before it escalated further.

In his statement, Sun pointed out that the attack could have serious consequences for both Aave and KelpDAO, saying, “It’s not worth risking both Aave and KelpDAO because of this hack.” He also alluded to the alleged theft of approximately $300 million in assets, adding, “You can’t spend $300 million anyway,” sending an indirect message to the attacker.

Sun’s move has brought back into focus the “white-hat consensus” method seen in previous major DeFi attacks. As you may recall, the exploit on KelpDAO’s rsETH bridge resulted in billions of dollars worth of ETH being withdrawn from Aave, creating significant liquidity pressure on the protocol.

*This is not investment advice.

Stablecoins, the $300 billion class of digital dollars, may have started as a faster way to move money across the globe, but companies are now asking a different question: what can they actually do with them?

That shift is driving a new phase of adoption, according to Chunda McCain, co-founder of Paxos Labs, who says the industry is moving beyond basic infrastructure toward real business use cases.

“The first step was getting a stablecoin,” McCain said in an interview with CoinDesk. “The next question is: what now?”

Last week, Paxos Labs underscored that direction by raising $12 million in a strategic funding round led by Blockchain Capital, with participation from Robot Ventures, Maelstrom and Uniswap. The lab unit was incubated under Paxos, the New York-based digital asset firm behind popular stablecoins such as PayPal’s $PYUSD ($PYUSD) and the Global Dollar (USDG). Paxos itself builds stablecoins and the immediate underlying infrastructure, while Paxos Labs intends to build tooling for further use of those stablecoins.

With the fresh funds, Paxos Labs is building what it calls a “financial utility stack” that lets companies turn digital assets into products through a single integration.

Its newly launched Amplify Suite bundles three core tools: Earn, which offers yield on digital assets; Borrow, which enables lending against them; and Mint, which supports branded stablecoin issuance. The idea behind that is to let firms integrate tokens into a business, then layer on capabilities over time.

Turning cost into revenue

For years, enterprise crypto adoption focused on “first-touch” capabilities like trading, custody or issuing a stablecoin. Those steps opened the door but rarely generated returns on their own, according to McCain

“Stablecoins [have been] loss leaders for years,” he said.

The opportunity lies in how those assets are used. Payments are a clear example: merchants typically give up 2% to 3% in fees, while stablecoin rails can reduce those costs and even generate yield on balances held onchain.

“You turn what has always been a cost into revenue,” he said.

Some of the more novel use cases sit at the intersection of payments and credit. Payment providers already track merchant revenues and cash flow, which puts them in a position to underwrite loans, McCain argued.

That could allow merchants to access financing based on real-time performance, while earning yield on incoming payments and settling instantly across borders. These models are still early, but the building blocks are starting to come together, he said.

Not every firm needs its own token

To capture these benefits, not every firm needs its own stablecoin.

While companies like PayPal have launched branded tokens to control payments and margins, issuing one requires significant investment in liquidity, compliance and distribution.

“If you just need the economics, you don’t need to build your own,” McCain said.

Many firms can instead integrate existing stablecoins and still benefit from lower costs and added yield.

The shift may lack the hype when big firms like Western Union announce their own token, but it carries tangible impact on how businesses operate.

Stablecoins are starting to reshape margins, unlock credit and change how money moves globally, especially where traditional systems remain costly or slow.

“It might sound boring, but this is the math,” McCain said.

The KelpDAO-related security breach crisis in the cryptocurrency market has led to a significant liquidity shock in DeFi protocols. According to recent data, large-scale $ETH outflows have occurred via Aave, while investor confidence is visibly weakening.

According to information shared by the on-chain analytics platform Lookonchain, the KelpDAO exploit resulted in a “bad debt” on Aave after the attacker withdrew $ETH from the system using rsETH collateral. This development triggered panic selling, particularly among large investors.

According to the data, a total of over $5.4 billion worth of $ETH was withdrawn from the platform. During this period, it was reported that Justin Sun, a leading figure in the cryptocurrency market, also withdrew approximately 65,584 $ETH (approximately $154 million).

Following these intense outflows, Aave’s $ETH usage reached 100%. This indicates that the protocol’s available liquidity has been largely depleted and that new borrowing capacity may be severely limited.

*This is not investment advice.

Aave just watched $6.6 billion walk out the door, and it’s not because anyone hacked Aave.

The protocol’s total value locked dropped from $26.4 billion on April 18 to nearly $20 billion in U.S. morning hours on Sunday, per DefiLlama. The $AAVE token fell 16% to $92, and daily fees spiked to $1.99 million as liquidations ripped through the weekend.

Depositors are running because Aave is carrying a hole it did not create. When attackers drained 116,500 rsETH from Kelp’s bridge on Saturday, they dumped the stolen tokens on Aave V3 as collateral and borrowed wrapped ether against them.

On-chain trackers put the Aave-specific borrow at roughly $196 million, with total positions across Aave, Compound and Euler around $236 million.

Aave is the largest lending protocol in DeFi, where users deposit crypto to earn yield and other users borrow against collateral. Kelp is a liquid restaking protocol, which takes ether that has already been staked on Ethereum and routes it through a separate yield-generating system called EigenLayer, issuing a receipt token called rsETH in exchange.

That rsETH is what users trade and, critically, what some users posted on Aave as collateral to borrow against.

On Saturday, attackers tricked Kelp’s cross-chain bridge into releasing 116,500 rsETH, about $292 million worth, to an address they controlled. They then deposited that stolen rsETH onto Aave V3 as collateral and borrowed wrapped ether against it.

A bridge is a blockchain-based took that transfers tokens between different networks, where they may not be originally supported.

Aave first said the Umbrella reserve would cover any deficit. By Saturday afternoon the language had softened to “explore paths to offset the deficit.” That is not how a protocol talks when it knows how much it owes and has the money to pay it.

The concentration explains why the damage lands here. Aave’s loan book spans 22 chains, but Ethereum alone holds $14.24 billion of the $17.82 billion in outstanding borrows. WETH is 39.49% of all loans on the protocol, meaning the attack hit the exact collateral-to-WETH pair that dominates Aave’s book.

Stani Kulechov, Aave’s founder, said the exploit was external and the protocol’s contracts were not compromised. But Aave accepted a liquid restaking token as collateral, and that token’s backing vanished on a bridge Aave does not control. The depositors lose either way.

Liquid restaking tokens were whitelisted across every major lending protocol because they carried yield and represented growing share of Ethereum’s locked value.

The risk models priced them as if they would hold peg under normal conditions. However, none of them priced a scenario where the collateral goes to zero because a bridge on a chain Aave does not touch got exploited on a Saturday.

“$AAVE is the backbone of DeFi, has billions in there, and pretty much every single new DeFi infrastructure on new chains is a fork of it,” trader Altcoin Sherpa wrote on X. “When $AAVE has contagion risk, it shows the fragility of the entire system.”

What the token price is trying to answer now is whether Umbrella is big enough to cover the hole, and whether stkAAVE holders who back that reserve are about to eat the loss.