The cryptocurrency trade noticed essentially the most violent hack of 2026 on Saturday night when an unknown perpetrator breached KelpDAO’s safety and drained nearly $300 million value of its liquid staking token, rsETH.
They managed to behave rapidly, depositing the stolen funds into a number of lending protocols, borrowing cash in opposition to them, and one among them simply skilled a large investor exodus as its personal token crashed laborious.
CryptoPotato defined intimately the occasions that came about on Saturday night from data supplied by the safety consultants at Cyvers. The dangerous actor compromised KelpDAO’s bridge contract, deposited the stolen rsETH into Aave V3, Compound V3, Euler, and different lending protocols, used it to borrow substantial quantities of WETH, and created greater than $236 million in debt.
Though Aave, alongside SparkLend and some different protocols, reacted by freezing sure affected markets, it appears buyers had been greater than dissatisfied by the occasions, particularly whales.
Lookonchain information present that a number of giant market members holding a large portion of AAVE went on a promoting spree because the asset’s worth began to nosedive. A whale recognized as smaugvision offered $2.06 million value of the token for USDC, one other one disposed of $2.05 million, and a 3rd one swapped $1.95 million value of AAVE for $1.18 million in ETH and 10.11 WBTC.
Because of the KelpDAO exploit creating dangerous debt on #Aave, $AAVE has dropped over 18% at the moment.
Whales are dumping $AAVE.
• smaugvision offered 20,015 $AAVE for two.06M $USDC at $103 avg.
• Whale 0xFC56 offered 20,000 $AAVE for two.05M $USDC at $103 avg.
• Whale 0xA2E4 offered 19,666 $AAVE… pic.twitter.com/NUjWxIgdp0
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) April 19, 2026
These appreciable market gross sales solely exacerbated AAVE’s worth decline. The token had peaked at nearly $120 yesterday, however crashed to $103 when the preliminary gross sales started. Shortly after, it plunged to $92, which represented a 22% decline from high to backside thus far.
AAVE has fallen out of the highest 50 alts by market cap as its personal has plummeted to simply over $1.4 billion on CoinGecko.
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