The decentralized finance (DeFi) sector has been hit by recent criticism and negative comments following a $20 billion drop in total value locked (TVL) and $1.1 billion lost to hacks like the $292 million Kelp DAO bridge exploit.
DeFi is no longer secure because AI is becoming ‘superhuman’ in hacking, former OpenZeppelin CTO and co-founder Manuel Aráoz said this week. “DeFi is dead,” said a commenter on X recently.
Andrew Forson, president of DeFi Technologies, has a completely opposite view and a bit of criticism of his own: “DeFi is much more than the 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 centralized 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 it works pretty much perfectly. Everyone else is trying to recreate it.”
Forson said traditional financial and security alarmists vastly overestimate localized code exploits to score reputation points against decentralized networks, completely missing the historic milestones happening right in front of their noses.
While an $11 million bridge failure makes immediate headlines, the absolute core of the DeFi sector, the stablecoin base layer, is seeing unprecedented institutional adoption. “Stablecoins at the end of 2025 had over $150 billion in US Treasuries,” Forson revealed. “It’s more than Saudi Arabia. It’s more than Germany in terms of their central banks and governments. All these government bonds are used to back currencies and stablecoins that are predominantly used in DeFi.”
Stablecoins had positions in US Treasuries of over $153 billion as of December 2025, according to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).
The quantities are expanded
Far from an ecosystem in collapse, 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 expected to reach somewhere between $730 trillion to over a quadrillion dollars by 2035.
Furthermore, the network security layer remains completely untouched by the “superhuman” AI hackers hyped by security companies. “You haven’t heard of any central hacks to the Bitcoin or Ethereum networks,” Forson noted. “You haven’t heard of any core hacks for Circles USDC or Tethers USDT.”
While security executives view the open source transparency of blockchain code as a fatal liability in the age of AI, Forson turns the argument on its head: onchain clarity is actually DeFi’s ultimate defense mechanism.
“One of the great things about the whole DeFi space is the transparency,” Forson explained. “When something goes wrong, everybody sees it, everybody talks about it, and they fix it.”
He contrasted this with traditional legacy banking, where systemic failures can sit hidden in “private buckets” for years before a corporate auditor notices or publicizes a breach.
Wall Street is embracing crypto
Recalling historic corporate collapses like Enron, Forson noted that financial systems have always had to develop safeguards after market shocks — just as Wall Street instituted automated stock loss provisions after the 1987 crash.
The fact that DeFi operates continuously – 24 hours a day, 365 days a week – means that protocol holes are exposed, stress tested and permanently patched exponentially faster than in any closed-door banking system.
“Toddlers learn to walk by falling,” Forson said, reminding critics that the entire blockchain space is only 16 years old. “There will always be people, devices and technologies that have errors or push the envelope. But that doesn’t mean you completely shut down the entire financial area.”
Forson concluded by saying that “if the Wall Street players don’t participate in this space now, they will lose market share because someone else will.”
The fact is, however, that Wall Street is racing to tokenize the entire stock market, and major financial institutions, including Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, JPMorgan, Charles Schwab, have all rolled out crypto services in one way or another.
