#Gate13周年现场直击 Web3 Today Must-Read | April 20th
Today’s Overview
• Kelp’s robbery caused a run that drained 6 billion dollars from Aave.
• Geopolitical forces are sealing the strait; BTC slips and fails to hold 75.
• MicroStrategy sweeps up another 2 billion dollars’ worth this week.
• XRP ETF pulls in 1.5 billion dollars in a single week, setting a record.
• The AI venture capital season breaks 200 billion; demand for computing power surges wildly.
• RAVE suffers a zero-to-collapse style rout, plunging; it’s suspected of highly concentrated market control.
• Crypto PAC receives a ten-million donation; lobbying efforts ramp up.
• Nomura: 60% of institutions have already listed crypto as a core holding.
• Vercel exposes vulnerabilities, sharply increasing front-end hijacking risk.
• France sees a surge in crypto kidnapping cases, raising serious concerns about personal safety.
Today’s Analysis
The keyword in today’s market is “vulnerability.” When an epic geopolitical black swan like a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz arrives, Bitcoin dropping below 75,000 USD is actually just a stress reaction to macro sentiment—the real main event is happening inside DeFi: Kelp DAO suffers a 292 million USD hack, directly pushing Aave, the DeFi “keystone,” toward a cliff of a 6.2 billion USD run. The signal behind this is extremely dangerous: the liquidity re-pledging (LRT) we’re proud of is evolving into Web3’s “subprime crisis.”
Put simply, the LRT protocol stores assets such as rsETH in Aave as collateral—essentially stacking another layer of Lego on top of leverage that was already fragile. Once a trust crisis hits the underlying assets, the drawbacks of the non-isolated lending model will spread like a plague. The 290 million USD in bad debt generated by Aave is only the tip of the iceberg; it’s the 6.2 billion USD liquidity stampede that has fled in panic that is the real vote against systemic confidence in DeFi.
What’s interesting is that while on-chain natives can’t sleep due to security loopholes and withdrawal panic, traditional institutions appear so calm it’s unsettling. Michael Saylor is still acting like a ruthless buy-the-dip machine—within 11 days, he has swallowed another 2 billion dollars’ worth of Bitcoin, with his holdings nearing 800,000 BTC. At the same time, the record-breaking 1.5 billion USD inflow into XRP ETFs and Nomura Securities’ research findings are both pointing to one fact: mainstream capital is using the volatility created by black swans to complete a “violent shakeout” of crypto assets. In their view, the declines sparked by geopolitics are not risk, but a rare entry window. This extreme contrast—“panic on-chain, greed off-chain”—shows that control of the market is accelerating away from retail users and DeFi protocols, shifting instead to Wall Street giants with seemingly unlimited firepower.
Even more alarming is that the dimension of security risk is now breaking through a kind of dimensional wall. Previously, what we feared was smart contract vulnerabilities. Now Vercel’s supply-chain crisis tells us that even if your contract code is perfect, a vulnerability in the front-end hosting platform alone can leave your project’s API keys and environment variables exposed.
And France’s frequent “wrench attacks” pull this anxiety out of cyberspace and back into real-world, physical reality—when hackers discover that the cost of on-chain attack-and-defense is getting higher and higher, they start choosing the most primitive and brutal way: going straight to your doorstep and knocking. This full encirclement—from supply-chain security all the way to personal safety—signals that Web3’s backwoods era has truly come to an end.
The battles ahead will be more than battles of code; they will be full-spectrum contests involving political lobbying (such as Fellowship PAC’s ten-million-level donations), macro hedging, and physical defense. In the end, today’s Web3 is no longer that little closed-door circle of “passing the ball left hand to right hand.” It has been dragged into global energy choke-point blockades, the frenzy of AI compute arms races, and the money politics of great-power lobbying. RaveDAO’s 90% plunge after highly concentrated manipulation is less like a shock from nowhere and more like the remnants of an old era collapsing amid their last riot.
The truly hardcore investors should see clearly that the chaos right now is a sweeping “purge of falsehoods.” Liquidity will gravitate toward compliant ETFs, computing power will move toward real AI demand, and those “pseudo-innovations” built on multiple layers of nested leverage are destined to be thoroughly washed clean in the next tidal wave like Aave’s run. Stay sharp—don’t let temporary red candles blind your eyes. The real main event is just getting started.
