Rob Hadick: Where Does DeFi Go From Here? (…And Why)

**Robbie** (0:00)
All right, guys, we are live in the Tokenization Tower with Rob. Rob, welcome to The Nest. I hope you enjoy the view. Not bad.

**Rob Hadick** (0:08)
I've lived in New York for 15 years and never been in the Empire State Building.

**Robbie** (0:11)
Really? Not once.

**Rob Hadick** (0:13)
First time.

**Robbie** (0:14)
Wow. Well, welcome.
This is a non-New Yorker here, coming to the realization that I've got, you know what, a lot of this choice to come up here was part product, part show, part like growing the business, and also part just lore. I just tell my kids, like, for some part of life, I was going to the Empire State Building each day.

**Rob Hadick** (0:35)
That's great. No, I mean, this is amazing view. I'm glad I came up here.

**Robbie** (0:39)
Well, it's good to have you, man. As I kind of told you prior to starting, the unfortunate reality here is that the topic of the day is certainly this largest exploit in DeFi of 2026
Yeah, there has as of late.

**Rob Hadick** (0:55)
Yeah.

**Robbie** (0:55)
Where were you when the when this exploit went down on Saturday?

**Rob Hadick** (1:00)
Where was I on Saturday? I might have been watching the Cavs playoff basketball when it happened. You know, I'm a big Cleveland Cavaliers fan. OK, so, you know, game one, they had to go and take it to the Raptors. So like, you know, beat them down bad. So it's good. Great. So go Cavs.
But I mean, it's like the weekend was it was tough, right? So, you know, we've got a lot of DeFi in the portfolio. Nobody directly affected. Everybody's fine. But, you know, you don't like to see this. Like you don't want to have something like this happen to the whole ecosystem. It's obviously, you know, all hands on deck to make sure everybody is OK. And so, you know, it was a long weekend for, I think, everybody in the space.

**Robbie** (1:38)
Yeah, it was. And it was and it's just kind of like a bit disheartening, but really just now we're thinking about the contagion and like how this spreads and who's affected. And yeah, it's looking like there's a lot of potential affected parties here.
You know, this composability of DeFi, right, is a beautiful thing. It's an amazing way to create very unique products that are just not available elsewhere. But when you come in, it also adds this kind of like layered risk, right? And we're seeing that play out real time. And, you know, like the thing that's kind of upset me is just the PVP on the com side. Yeah, I just don't like to see like the lawyer drafted memos. No, like it just doesn't seem like anyone's wanting to help each other. It's just like everyone's covering their own ass.

**Rob Hadick** (2:28)
Yeah, it's pretty clear that, you know, the statement that Layers Zero put out was heavily drafted by lawyers. Like, I think that's very clear. I think you said this before, but I don't think we've seen a kelp statement yet there. You know, there's like a leaked coin desk article where they said they saw the draft of the memo. I am sure that has a bunch of legalese in it as well.
I think there's, I mean, there's a real liability here, right? And so I think that's obviously what people are worried about. It makes complete sense from their perspective. Their shareholders, you know, potentially their token holders, that like they would end up doing this. And, you know, wanting to make sure that they were legally buttoned up.
I don't think anybody looks particularly good in this situation right now. Like, there's very obvious issues around the one-on-one DVN setup. That, you know, while the LayerZero team has been, you know, very adamant that, hey, they told Kelp that they shouldn't have had the one-on-one.
You know, it seems like, you know, something like 40% of people operating on LayerZero right now have a one-on-one setup. Like, you know, documentation, at least at some point, has, you know, suggested that that is fine. I think it's also we haven't quite gotten the full story from them around how the hack happened. It seemed like it seems like from like reading between the lines, maybe there was, you know, a infiltration inside the team or, you know, inside their their security setup. That's unclear. That might be speculation. So, you know, don't don't take that for my word. But so there's there's that piece. And then, you know, obviously from the Kelp side, like they also deserve to like they should have been more security conscious, right? Like for sure, there's, you know, we've seen even if 40% of the DVNs are one of one 60% of people and, you know, if what they're saying is true, which is that the layers of your documentation said, hey, like, this is what you should be doing. There's still 60% of people who decided that they looked at the documentation and that is not what we should be doing. Like we should be more security conscious. We should be more on top of it. There's a lot of people who have put in their own like throttling mechanism as well on the lending side. And so there's a lot of teams that were much more on top of it than they were. And so there's neither of them look good. They're both pointing the fingers at each other. And then, you know, the obvious situation, which, you know, we can talk about, you know, what type of assets should be able to have a 93% LTV, right? But you take all of it and you look around and you say, there needs to be more thoughtfulness around the real risk of what some of these wrapped assets, you know, present. And there needs to be more thoughtfulness around, you know, what cross chain, what it means to be, you know, having an unbacked token on, you know, when you're doing the cross chain bridge, right? And like how we should think about what that risk looks like, and, you know, across the L2 ecosystem versus mainnet. And so there's going to be a lot of conversation around this, you know, I think across all of DeFi for, you know, weeks, if not months.