Freed

Past days has been extremely hardcore for our team and DeFi in general. DeFi went trough a substantial stress test and the consequences were felt. It definitely was the hardest couple of weeks that I experienced in my life and during the past decade building in the space. I am still writing this with couple of hours of sleep per day so bear with me. For me personally, the rsETH bridge incident was unfortunate as our team and community has put so much effort into securing the protocol and seeing the exploit happening outside of the protocol smart contracts, and affecting the markets is hard to watch even when the markets had (and still have) full backing like Mainnet Core. That being said, Aave has seen multiple market/credit cycles and always has been able to prove its resiliency. I have more confidence in DeFi today than ever, not because of the industry is stepping up and improving security practices, but because there is a true community behind DeFi that is willing to help and do whatever it takes to ensure our space has future. I want to say that during all this madness there were lot of people that were extremely supportive and proactive to mitigate any issues and contagion. At the first glance, from Aave's perspective we were positive that we would find a resolution and we had overall balance sheet, protocol revenue and external/public support to over come the issue from Aave's perspective but what we understood is that the issue was beyond Aave. It was about restoring the whole state of DeFi, avoid contagion and ensuring that the whole ecosystem overcome this incident not solely Aave. DeFi United started as an initiative from DeFi protocols that were affected but eventually became an industry wide movement to save DeFi and bring protocols together. I am grateful for all the contributions and support that everyone has been providing and can say that this wouldn't be possible without it. I'd hope that DeFi United becomes a permanent movement in some shape or form with the right form factor. DeFi United was executed at insane speed and other constraints but there could be a model that could continuously support the industry from the unexpected. I'd say during the past week lot of people stood up and I really don't have the space to mention everyone (you know who you are) but specifically I want to say that @MikeSilagadze deserves more respect from the space than anyone else atm, he went above and beyond and was willing to sacrifice a lot to solve what actually wasn't something cause by his efforts. Full respect. @LidoFinance team also deserve special credit, this team truly cares about DeFi and was extremely helpful along the way. They deserve full credit. @gdog97_ deserves credit as well, who helped to brainstorm various solutions and also stepping in with Ethena and helping on coordination. @arbitrum community for doing the right thing and rescuing the funds from the bridge contract that was a difficult but the right call. @Mantle_Official @Bybit_Official team for stepping up as well and showing strong support. The team has been supportive and truly cares about making the space safe. Last but not least lot of credit goes to @ethereumJoseph who really stepped in to help DeFi and the ecosystem. Joe cares about Ethereum, he cares about DeFi and understand the importance of DeFi for the future of Ethereum. We have truly good people within our community. These folks are true guardians of our space (among others on my long list) that really want DeFi to win. I feel very optimistic now about our space, it is true that events like these can be a setback but in reality it builds resiliency, which our space stands for, and over time that is hard to beat by legacy systems. The past week we had to operate in multiple different constraints from time, information, resources, governance and other. We had to move as fast as we could as time was against us. It was a large coordination effort that we haven't experienced so far. I'd like to give most of this credit to our team and community especially @Token_Logic and @LlamaRisk who went also above and beyond to find resolutions and coordinate. There has been some banter about right type of market structure for onchain lending between shared or isolated pools but the reality is that when capital moves, it moves at scale and market structures are less of a mitigating factor. These kinds of times require to find solutions fast and reestablish the trust in the markets and the technology, that's whats important. All this being said there are some great learnings from this indecent like from any incident and we as any other team involved will share a post mortem and steps to improve anti-fragility. I might be now less bullish on onchain lending as infrastructure and more leaning towards a model where the market structures need to be backed by strong balance sheets and risk transfers, however this is another discussion for the future as issues can stem outside of the protocol's control. Now as the markets on Ethereum mainnet Core are restoring, our team continues to execute the technical plan to restore rest all the markets. Thank you for everyone who has been supportive and we will keep you up to date as we progress. DeFi United.

Today, we are announcing a strategic integration in collaboration with @Securitize, to make @BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) available to trade via UniswapX through Securitize