The decentralized finance (DeFi) sector has been hit by recent criticism and negative commentary following a $20 billion drop in total value locked (TVL) and a $1.1 billion loss due to hacks such as the $292 million Kelp DAO bridge exploit.
DeFi is no longer safe because AI is becoming “superhuman” in hacking, former OpenZeppelin CTO and co-founder Manuel Aráoz said this week. “DeFi is dead,” one X commenter recently said.
Andrew Forson, president of DeFi Technologies, has a completely opposite and somewhat critical view: “DeFi is much more than those protocols that have been hacked,” Forson said in an interview with CoinDesk. “Those who do not know, suffer from profound ignorance.”
“We’ve been to a conference where people are talking a lot about central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and central bank money.” he added, referring to the recent Digital Money Summit in London. “But the elephant in the room is that you have Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC, and they’re working pretty much perfectly. Everyone else is trying to recreate that.”
Forson said traditional finance and security alarmists significantly exaggerate localized code exploits to gain reputation points against decentralized networks, completely omitting the historical milestones happening right under their noses.
While the failure of an $11 million bridge immediately makes headlines, the absolute core of the DeFi sector, the base layer of the stablecoin, is seeing unprecedented institutional adoption. “At the end of 2025, stablecoins held more than $150 billion in US Treasuries,” Forson revealed. “That’s more than Saudi Arabia. That’s more than Germany in terms of their central banks and governments. All of those treasuries are used to back currencies and stablecoins that are predominantly used in DeFi.”
Stablecoins held positions in US Treasury bills exceeding $153 billion as of December 2025, according to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).
Expanding volumes
Far from a collapsing ecosystem, Forson emphasized that core stablecoin volumes are expanding at a rate of 20% to 30% month over month.
Blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis estimates that stablecoins moved more than $35 trillion last year, a figure that is expected to reach between $730 trillion and more than $1 trillion by 2035.
Furthermore, the network security layer remains completely untouched by the “superhuman” AI hackers touted by security companies. “You haven’t heard of any hacks into the Bitcoin or Ethereum networks,” Forson noted. “You haven’t heard of any core hacks for Circle’s USDC or Tether’s USDT.”
While security executives consider blockchain code transparency a fatal risk in the age of AI, Forson turns the argument on its head: on-chain clarity is actually DeFi’s ultimate defense mechanism.
“One of the nice things about the entire DeFi space is transparency,” Forson explained. “When something goes wrong, everyone sees it, everyone talks about it and they fix it.”
He contrasted this with traditional banking, where systemic errors can remain hidden in “private buckets” for years before a corporate auditor notices or publishes a violation.
Wall Street embraces cryptocurrencies
Recalling historic corporate collapses like Enron, Forson noted that financial systems have always had to design safeguards after market shocks, just as Wall Street introduced automated provisions for stock losses after the 1987 crash.
The fact that DeFi operates continuously (24 hours a day, 365 days a week) means that protocol gaps are exposed, stress tested, and permanently patched exponentially faster than in any closed-door banking system.
“Little children learn to walk by falling,” Forson said, reminding critics that the entire blockchain space is only 16 years old. “There will always be people, entities and technologies that make mistakes or go further. But that doesn’t mean we should completely close down that entire field of finance.”
Forson concluded by saying that “if Wall Street players don’t participate in this space now, they will lose market share, because someone else will.”
However, the fact is that Wall Street is racing to tokenize the entire stock market and major financial institutions including Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Charles Schwab have implemented crypto services in one form or another.
