The decentralized finance (DeFi) industry has been hit by recent criticism and negative commentary after a $20 billion drop in total value (TVL) and $1.1 billion lost due to hacks such as the $292 million Kelp DAO bridge exploit.
DeFi is no longer secure because AI becomes “superhuman” in hacking, former OpenZeppelin CTO and co-founder Manuel Aráoz said this week. “DeFi is dead,” one commenter recently said on X.
Andrew Forson, president of DeFi Technologies, has a completely opposite view and some criticism of his own: “DeFi is much more than the protocols that have been hacked,” Forson said in an interview with CoinDesk. “Anyone who does not know this suffers from deep ignorance.”
“We’ve been at 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 $USDT and that of Circle $USDCand it works almost perfectly. Everyone is trying to recreate that.”
Forson said traditional financial and security alarmists are significantly exaggerating localized code exploits to score reputation points against decentralized networks, completely missing the historical milestones happening right under their noses.
While an $11 million bridge failure immediately makes headlines, the absolute core of the DeFi sector, the stablecoin base layer, is seeing unprecedented institutional adoption. “Stablecoins held more than $150 billion in US Treasuries at the end of 2025,” Forson revealed. “That’s more than Saudi Arabia. That’s more than Germany in terms of their central banks and governments. All those government bonds are used to back currencies and stablecoins used primarily in DeFi.”
Stable coins holdings of more than $153 billion in U.S. Treasury securities according to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) from December 2025.
Volumes are growing
Rather than the ecosystem collapsing, Forson emphasizes that stablecoin core volumes are increasing 20% to 30% monthly.
Blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis estimates that stablecoins moved more than $35 trillion last year, a figure expected to be somewhere between $730 trillion and more than a trillion dollars by 2035.
Furthermore, the network security layer remains completely untouched by the ‘superhuman’ AI hackers hyped by security companies. “You’ve never heard of core hacks on the Bitcoin or Ethereum networks,” Forson noted. “You’ve never heard of nuclear hacks on Circle’s $USDC or Tether’s $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: on-chain clarity is actually DeFi’s ultimate defense mechanism.
“One of the good things about the whole DeFi space is the transparency,” Forson explains. “If something goes wrong, everyone sees it, everyone talks about it and they fix it.”
He contrasted this with traditional traditional banking, where system flaws can remain hidden in “private buckets” for years before a corporate auditor spots or publicizes a breach.
Wall Street embraces crypto
Recalling historic corporate failures such as Enron, Forson noted that financial systems have always had to take precautions after market shocks – just as Wall Street introduced automated inventory loss provisions after the 1987 crash.
The fact that DeFi operates continuously – 24 hours a day, 365 days a week – means that gaps in the protocol are exposed, stress-tested and permanently patched exponentially faster than any 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, entities and technologies that make mistakes or push the boundaries. But that doesn’t mean you should completely close down that entire field of finance.”
Forson concluded by saying that “if the Wall Street players don’t enter 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 and Charles Schwab, have all rolled out crypto services in one form or another.