Aave V3 shed $4B in liquidity in 29 hours after the Kelp DAO rsETH bridge exploit.

Aave V3 saw $4.0 billion in available liquidity drain away within 29 hours following the Kelp DAO rsETH bridge exploit. WETH utilization hit 100% in just 1.4 hours — a full seven hours before the Protocol Guardian stepped in to freeze activity, exposing a significant gap in response time.

The core contracts held under pressure, which is a meaningful stress-test result. The failure point was the bridge, not Aave's own smart contract layer — a distinction that matters for how the post-mortem gets read across the DeFi ecosystem.

The episode underscores how bridge vulnerabilities remain the most acute systemic risk in multi-chain DeFi: a single cross-chain failure can drain liquidity from otherwise sound protocols in under two hours.