Curve Founder Calls for Urgent DeFi Safety Rules

• Curve founder Egorov warns that centralized failure points in DeFi are causing preventable and damaging hacks.
• Aave, rsETH, and LayerZero incidents revealed how interconnected protocols create cascading risks for everyday users.
• Egorov urges Ethereum and Solana Foundations to lead a coordinated push for formal DeFi safety standards.

Curve Finance founder Michael Egorov is calling for urgent DeFi safety standards across the industry. A string of recent hacks tied to centralized points of failure has prompted his public appeal. 

Egorov cited the Aave and rsETH incidents as examples of preventable failures that harmed ordinary users. 

He urged projects, auditors, and risk teams to develop shared safety principles. The Ethereum and Solana Foundations, he added, should spearhead that collective effort.

Curve Founder Points to Cascading Failures as Proof of Systemic Risk

Egorov used a straightforward scenario to illustrate the scale of the problem facing DeFi users today. He described an ordinary person depositing life savings into Aave, only to find withdrawals blocked on a Monday morning. 

Aave maintained its protocol worked as intended, directing blame toward the rsETH exploit. rsETH, in turn, pointed to a compromised LayerZero bridge as the root cause.

LayerZero similarly maintained that its own infrastructure had functioned correctly throughout the incident. Yet the end user remained unable to access her funds despite no single party accepting fault. 

This chain of deflected responsibility, Egorov argued, exposes a dangerous gap in how DeFi protocols handle shared risk. The situation, he wrote, raised a direct question about the industry’s credibility.

He posted, “Are we industry of clowns? But here’s the thing. All issues like this should be prevented BEFORE they happen, not AFTER.”

His concern centers on the growing number of centralized dependencies quietly embedded within supposedly decentralized protocols. 

Each dependency introduces a single point of failure that, when exploited, can trigger losses far beyond its own ecosystem. Reducing those dependencies, or at minimum splitting trust across them, must become a priority for builders.

Egorov Calls on Ethereum and Solana Foundations to Lead Safety Initiative

Beyond identifying the problem, Egorov put forward a concrete path toward safer DeFi infrastructure. He called on projects, auditors, and risk assessment groups to openly share their best practices. 

This collective knowledge, as he saw it, should become the foundation upon which standards of safety in the industry would be established.

This responsibility should be taken up by none other than the Ethereum Foundation and Solana Foundation. 

Both organizations carry the institutional credibility to bring competing ecosystem projects into meaningful dialogue. 

A coordinated framework, he suggested, could produce clear principles and practical recommendations for safe protocol construction.

Egorov also pointed toward traditional finance as an unexpected source of useful guidance. Legacy financial systems manage far more centralized points of failure, yet have developed tested practices for protecting them. 

DeFi, he noted, can adapt those risk management lessons without abandoning its core decentralized values.

He closed with a firm belief that decentralized finance remains the future of the global financial system, making these safety standards not optional but essential.