Miami – Aave Labs is set to fundamentally reshape how it assesses and lists security assets on its protocol, following the largest DeFi deployment in 2026, and the overhaul could set a new standard across the entire industry.
Linda Jeng, general counsel and policy officer at Aave Labs, said at Consensus Miami 2026 that the protocol’s existing risk framework, while robust, had been too narrowly focused on financial risk and volatility.
Going forward, any asset seeking to be listed on Aave will face a broader assessment covering interoperability, cyber security vulnerabilities and the underlying architecture of the asset. She cited rsETH, the rewrite token issued by KelpDAO that sat at the center of April’s crisis, as the catalyst for the change.
In addition to the new assessment criteria, Jeng announced that Aave would publish a formal playbook for asset issuers – a set of minimum standards that projects must meet before they can be listed on the protocol. She also said Aave would begin to examine systemic interconnections across protocols, moving away from analyzing pools in isolation to understanding how exposure in one corner of DeFi can ripple into another.
“Coming out of a crisis like this, it raises our standards,” she said.
The remarks came as Jeng reflected on a month she described as “two weeks without sleep.” An attacker had exploited KelpDAO’s cross-chain bridge, minted 116,500 unbacked rsETH tokens worth around $293 million and then deposited them in Aave as collateral to borrow real wrapped ether – leaving the protocol with hundreds of millions in impaired debt.
Jeng, who worked as a regulator during the 2008 financial crisis, said the episode triggered a strong sense of déjà vu. But the decision, she argued, was markedly different. Instead of a government-led bailout, the industry mobilized itself. An initiative called “DeFi United,” which has drawn commitments from Lido, EtherFi, Athena and others, was launched to cover the collateral shortfall and prevent systemic bad debt from spreading further across the DeFi loan markets.
“In the financial crisis we had to bail out the banks,” she said. “Here we came together as an ecosystem to save ourselves.”
