OpenZeppelin Co-Founder: All of DeFi Is Unsafe!

Manuel Aráoz, co-founder of OpenZeppelin — the security firm behind audits for Aave, Compound, MakerDAO, Uniswap, and Coinbase — has issued a stark personal warning: he now believes all of DeFi is unsafe and has advised friends and family to exit every DeFi position they hold.

The trigger is structural, not cyclical. Aráoz argues that AI coding agents have reached superhuman capability in vulnerability discovery, fundamentally breaking the economics of smart contract security. The asymmetry has always been brutal — attackers need to find one flaw, defenders must find them all — but AI-assisted exploit discovery tips that balance decisively toward the attacker.

The warning carries unusual weight precisely because of its source. OpenZeppelin has been the closest thing DeFi has to a gold-standard auditor for years.