
DeFi | @TrustWallet | ex @chaoslabs
Joined February 2023
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atis elsts retweeted
I've been an LP since Uniswap v1, and I still LP every day. My UniswapDAO mandate was always to be a voice for LPs.
I just voted NO on the Uniswap v4 fee switch proposal.
Put simply: turning on the fee switch makes LPing structurally unprofitable. See my temp check post for more details.
So while it saddens me that plain "vanilla" Uniswap might be going away, AMMs as a primitive are simply too powerful to disappear.
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Disclosure: I'm the founder of Panoptic, and our protocol can benefit from this vote if LPs choose to migrate to it.
I am voting NO anyway because the survival of Uniswap, and every protocol/hook/product built on top of it, still depends on LPs powering the ecosystem.
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I sincerely want to thank 0x6c3A...E62e for delegating their UNI voting power to me over the past 3 years. But this vote will be my last vote as a UniswapDAO delegate.
atis elsts retweeted
For one, I believe that audits (for code bugs) are one of the things that DeFi does get right.
And better audits or formal verification wouldn't have prevented most of the recent exploits:
Resolv, Drift > private key compromise + lack to timelock and other circuit breakers
Venus Protocol > economic attack, flagged by audits but ignored
Aperture Finance, Solv > bugs in unaudited contracts
Makina Finance > vault logic compromise, OOS for audits
In TradFi, companies are mandated to do thorough risk management by law. In DeFi, we're not. Solution? More social consensus that DeFi needs to learn to take better care of its risks. This already works with code audits - everyone believes that a protocol that doesn't have code reviewed by security experts can't be taken seriously. It also works for L2s because we have @l2beat.
Comparably, we don't have nearly as good insight into the admin control levels of major DeFi protocol deployments. Similarly, we know far more about how to exit L2s in times of crisis than how to exit major DeFi protocols if/when their admin decides to do something funky.
EF doesn't need to pick and choose some favorite protocols. But it would be nice to recognize that there's a crisis in "low-risk" DeFi and push for a more principled approach, where risk management goes beyond looking for bugs in the code.
atis elsts retweeted
1/ Drift's admin key was compromised.
$213M+ drained from @solana's largest DEX in under 10 seconds.
Unfortunately, we've seen similar patterns before:
- fake collateral market
- a manipulated oracle
- disabled circuit breakers
Let's break it down 👇
written w/ Chaos AI
atis elsts retweeted
Most yield products optimize for APY and bolt on risk
as an afterthought.
All @chaoslabs vaults are powered by the same Chaos AI risk models that have secured trillions in vol and billions in asset deposits.
The appetite for Low-Risk DeFi is real.
Higher.
UPDATE: $35M+ deposited into Chaos @Veda_labs Vaults on @Krakenfx DeFi Earn & @Krak
• Balanced & Boosted strategies, risk-first by design and powered by the Chaos intelligence suite
• Real-time monitoring across solvency, liquidity, and yield volatility
• Instant redemptions
atis elsts retweeted
1/ stETH CAPO Misconfiguration
Today, a misconfiguration on Aave's CAPO oracle caused wstETH E-Mode liquidations, resulting in a loss of 345 ETH.
No bad debt was incurred, and all affected users will be fully reimbursed.
More below.
atis elsts retweeted
There’s been a large reshuffling of UNI delegations.
Some of the new delegates are doxxed and worthy of respect: @kain @haydenzadams @ianlapham @B0R444.
But most are anonymous wallets, with little indication of what interests they represent & how active they plan to be.
atis elsts retweeted
DeFi Funding-Rate Swaps: An Overview of Pendle Boros
In this video, our senior data scientist @0xAMRodrigues breaks down interest-rate swap architecture, funding-rate dynamics and how the @boros_fi risk framework was designed.
atis elsts retweeted
Replying to @Sigil_Intern
Censorship ~ apple trees breaking. Most users aren't going to be directly affected most of the time, so on the average they would not care.
MEV value leakage ~ apples falling outside the fence and getting lost or taken by strangers. That's also bad, but happens a lot.
Reducing both is good but making trees virtually unbreakable could be better because that's something quite unique.
atis elsts retweeted
With 12 second blocks , being 30 ms faster doesn’t matter much. When blocks are around 100 ms, it matters a lot.
Here's is a simple model showing how exactly block-time dynamics push builders toward collocation.
xitter.cf/RyanSAdams/status/1991…
People misunderstand Ethereum's rollup strategy.
The killer feature isn’t TPS, it’s latency game resistance.
Resistance to:
- Maximum extractable value
- High frequency trading (HFT)
- Cartels and corruption
Play the HFT game, lose your soul.
There’s constant pressure on any trading chain to slash latency.
Faster blocks, better UX.
So they keep pushing it down:
L1s:
Solana – 400ms
Monad – 400ms
Hyperliquid – 70ms
L2s:
Arbitrum – 250ms
zkSync – 200ms
MegaETH – 10ms
Then there’s Ethereum:
Ethereum – 12,000ms.
It might one day do 2,000–6,000ms, but it will *always* be slower than the instant block-rate chains.
That’s by design.
Why does this matter?
Because low latency makes MEV cartels.
This is how long it takes a packet to cross an ocean in practice:
80–200ms – data centers
150–400ms – home setups
If your block time is in the low hundreds of ms, only co-located data-center nodes see the flow in time.
They get the orderflow.
They get the MEV.
They get the power.
Being in Amsterdam / Frankfurt / major hubs gives a material edge.
Being in the same rack as everyone else? Even better.
Relentless market pressure to co-locate.
To go even lower, you don’t use the public internet. You use private dark fiber. DoubleZero. TradFi tools.
This doesn’t create global fairness. It creates colo races, MEV cartels, self-dealing and extraction.
Slowly, then all at once.
Corruption is cancer. A bad cell that keeps replicating until it kills the body unless the immune system stops it.
Centralization turns off the immune system.
That’s why L2s are brilliant.
Ethereum knew HFT games were inevitable. So instead of playing the game on L1, it contains the game on L2s.
Arbitrum can crank block times below 100ms.
MegaETH can run at 10ms.
Sequencers can co-lo max and play HFT harder than any L1.
But they’re still kept in check.
They can’t steal user funds or permanently censor them because there’s always an exit to Ethereum L1.
L2s are fenced by thousands of decentralized validators, globally distributed, many running from homes, settling at a calm 12,000ms heartbeat.
L2s can centralize sequencing and play the speed game.
Ethereum can remain decentralized and incorruptible.
Decentralization is corruption-resistance tech.
It’s an immune system against theft, censorship, inflation, and extraction by self-dealing elites and powerful cartels.
Exactly what the global financial system lacks.
Ethereum = incorruptible world ledger
ETH = incorruptible world reserve asset
atis elsts retweeted
1/ TL;DR
Hours after a multichain @Balancer exploit triggered widespread uncertainty across DeFi, @berachain executed an emergency hard fork, and @SonicLabs froze the attacker’s wallet.
Shortly after, Stream Finance’s xUSD began to depeg materially below its target range.
atis elsts retweeted
Friday could have one of DeFi's worst black swan events.
On paper, over $19 billion in liquidations hit across CEXs and perp DEXs. The real figure was likely higher. Many were surprised that on-chain lending markets came out mostly untouched, but outcomes can be misleading.
Markets saw violent dislocations:
PAXG at $3,600 on @binance
EURC at $1.085 on @coinbase
USDE at $0.65 on Binance
These were not depegs. A mispricing on a single venue is not a structural loss of parity.
However, if those gaps had remained open, the price impact would have spilled over into DEXs and lending markets, draining liquidity and triggering liquidations faster than the system could absorb.
On @aave alone, $4.8 billion in positions were at risk, with $180 million in potential penalties. If those liquidations had cleared, assets would have gone to zero before stabilizers could react.
We avoided that outcome because of risk management deliberate design choices. One of them was the decision to price USDe 1:1 with USDT (s/o to @LlamaRisk too!).
The Limits of Traditional Oracles
Traditional price oracles are a pale version of what a true oracle should be. They aggregate quotes from secondary markets and assume those order books reflect fair value. That assumption works for liquid, fungible assets. Not for the new class of asset-backed and mechanism-dependent tokens that now dominate DeFi.
For tokens like:
- USDe
- LRTs
- PTs
- tokenized RWAs
Value depends on primary liquidity, reserve composition, and redemption mechanics. Treating all tokens as homogenous ignores these embedded dependencies and redemption paths that define their real economic worth.
A real oracle must go deeper. It must integrate every structural layer. Reserves, counterparties, redemption logic, protocol logic, and dependencies, to produce a risk-aware measure of value. Otherwise, you’re not pricing assets; you’re quoting volatility.
The Convergence of Price, Proof, and Risk
This is where price, proof of reserve, and risk oracles converge. They are not separate systems but interdependent layers of the same framework.
For asset-backed tokens, value cannot be defined solely by a price oracle. It emerges from the combination of market pricing and verified reserves. The interaction between what the market observes and what can be proven to exist.
Price oracles surface external market signals that reflect secondary-market behavior.
Proof-of-reserve oracles ground those signals in verifiable collateral, confirming the economic backing that gives the token meaning.
Risk oracles contextualize both, determining what the asset is worth to a specific system based on its structure, liquidity, and correlation to other exposures.
In other words, price without proof is speculation, and proof without context is static.
True valuation in DeFi depends on all three layers working together: market, backing, and risk, operating in real time.
Proof-of-Reserve oracles are progress, but we’re still far from the endgame. There’s no standard for attestation frequency or depth. Every gap between proofs is a blind spot where solvency is assumed, not verified. The ideal state is continuous, real-time attestation enabling live, observable reserves that update as conditions change. We’re moving in that direction, but we’re not there yet.
** Oracles, in a world of sophisticated DeFi, are application-specific instruments of risk, not universal truth machines. **
A lending market shouldn’t necessarily use the same oracle as a perps exchange.
Each system must decide what kind of volatility it wants to internalize and what kind it’s willing to pass downstream.
There’s no free lunch; pricing stability always transfers volatility somewhere else. The question is who absorbs it, and when.
Hard-coding 1:1 parity can be the right trade-off for lending systems that prioritize depositor safety, but it’s not universally optimal or endgame.
The underlying NAV risk doesn’t disappear; it just moves. Good risk design makes that transfer explicit, transparent, and priced.
A Call for Discipline
If you’re an asset issuer minting a tokenized RWA, stablecoin, or money market instrument, you must have a proof-of-reserve system in place and work with an oracle to provide a PoR oracle. Without it, integrators like lending markets, perp DEXs, and vault managers are blindly extending credit to your assumptions of solvency.
And if you’re an integrator:
- an exchange
- lending protocol
- vault manager
you need to work directly with asset issuers and risk partners to understand each asset’s structure, redemption logic, and reserve mechanics. Otherwise, your users will absorb risks that should have been managed at the protocol level.
The Path Forward
Yesterday could’ve been ** much worse ** for DeFi.
We’re building systems that now mirror the scale of traditional finance, but not yet its discipline. Real progress in financial infrastructure won’t come from speed . It will come from precision, transparency, and shared standards.
Every oracle, asset, and market design is a set of trade-offs.
The next phase of DeFi will belong to those who recognize that truth early and build with that rigor. Not those who move fastest, but those who move correctly.
atis elsts retweeted
This is why a price oracle ** is ** a risk oracle.
Secondary market price of @ethena's USDe temporarily hit 0.65 on secondary markets like @binance due to the market sell-off, following Trump's China tariff news.
All of this is while USDE was overcollateralized, continuing to function with no downtime, and processed mints and burns.
The @chaoslabs price methodology saved 4.5 billion worth of positions on @aave, and saving users ~180m in liquidation penalties, and cascades thereafter.
This pricing methodology was developed following a lively debate within the DAO. We advocated for it due to the existence of the Ethena Proof of Reserve oracle and our deep analysis of the protocol.
governance.aave.com/t/arfc-s…
Will do a full summary of market happenings and oracle performance soon, but TLDR @aave and user funds are safe!
atis elsts retweeted
Low-risk defi can be for Ethereum what search was for Google
vitalik.eth.limo/general/202…
atis elsts retweeted
The EU’s proposed Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse (aka Chat Control) has been stuck for years (because it’s unprecedented, and because it could set a dangerous precedent for mass scanning of private communications), but it's reaching its final stage.
What does it mean? 👇🧵
atis elsts retweeted
Bunni appears to have been exploited on Unichain and Ethereum. Remove funds from Bunni ASAP if you have any on other networks.
Note that Bunni rebalances funds in/out of Euler but Euler is not affected or at risk.
atis elsts retweeted
Equipping Uniswap Governance for the future
Today, we’re proposing the creation of DUNI: a new legal entity formed as a Wyoming DUNA to give Uniswap Governance real-world recognition, new capabilities, and greater autonomy
Let's dive in ↓
gov.uniswap.org/t/rfc-establ…






















