A $293 Million Hack Wiped $8 Billion From Aave Crypto TVL: Is the DeFi Protocol in Crisis?

Aave crypto is bleeding. The DeFi lending giant has shed nearly 21% over seven days, with AAVE trading around $90–$91 after a weekend that exposed just how quickly contagion spreads through interconnected DeFi protocols.

Volume spiked 50.20% to $539.45M in 24 hours, but that’s panic volume, not accumulation. Whether this selloff represents a buying opportunity or the start of a deeper unwind depends entirely on what happens next with protocol confidence.

The incident that triggered the collapse began Saturday when hackers drained 116,500 rsETH tokens worth approximately $293 million from Kelp DAO’s LayerZero-powered bridge.

The stolen funds were posted as collateral on Aave v3 to borrow wrapped Ether, leaving roughly $195 million in bad debt on the protocol.

Crypto analytics platform Lookonchain flagged the largest withdrawals: MEXC pulled $431 million, Abraxas Capital followed at $392 million.

Aave’s total value locked collapsed from $26.4 billion to $17.94 billion, stripping it of the top DeFi protocol ranking it held going into the weekend. Curve Finance, Ethena, and BitGo’s Wrapped Bitcoin all paused LayerZero bridge usage as a precaution.

The broader macro environment for crypto was already fragile. Now AAVE faces a protocol-specific credibility crisis layered on top of market-wide pressure — a combination that rarely resolves quickly.

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Can AAVE Crypto Price Recover to $120 This Week?

The honest answer: not easily. AAVE sits near $91 on major exchanges, down roughly 6% on Kraken in 24 hours and over 20% on the week, a significant deviation from the broader market’s comparatively mild -0.50% seven-day performance.

The all-time high of $661.69 feels like a different asset entirely from this distance (54% drawdown at current levels).

Volume surging alongside price decline is a classic distribution signal. It suggests sellers are finding liquidity into any bounce rather than buyers absorbing the dip with conviction.

The $90–$92 zone is acting as immediate support; a clean break below $89, which AAVE crypto briefly touched during the initial panic, opens the door toward the $78–$80 range where structural demand last materialized.

More realistically though, it usually takes time to rebuild trust after something like this, so price likely sits between $88 and $100 while the market processes the damage and watches how users react, which keeps any recovery slow and capped.

The real risk is if capital keeps leaving, because if TVL drops under $15B and withdrawals continue, that pressure shows up directly in price, and once $85 breaks, the structure weakens fast and opens the door toward $70.

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Maxi Doge Eyes Early-Mover Upside as AAVE Absorbs Protocol Shock

Watching an established DeFi blue chip shed $8 billion in TVL over a weekend raises a reasonable question: when protocol risk can wipe out gains this fast, where does smart money rotate for asymmetric upside? The answer, increasingly, is early-stage presales, where market cap is microscopic, and the exploit risk of a $26B lending protocol simply doesn’t apply.

Maxi Doge ($MAXI) is one of the more unconventional entries in the current presale cycle — a meme token built on Ethereum that leans hard into the 1000x leverage trading mentality through what it calls “Lever King Culture.”

The project has raised $4,745,091.23 at a current presale price of $0.0002814, with dynamic staking APY available to participants.

Features include holder-only trading competitions with leaderboard rewards and a Maxi Fund treasury allocated to liquidity and partnerships.

The gym-bro branding is deliberate, viral meme marketing has driven outsized returns in this cycle before (Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, and their descendants all started somewhere).

Risk is real: meme tokens are high-volatility, high-failure-rate instruments. DYOR is not optional here. For those with risk appetite suited to early-stage exposure, research Maxi Doge before the presale window closes.

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