Whoops, apologies if you came here looking for yield.
Here’s what I’m going to talk about this week:
Summary
The State of Yield
So What Am I Doing?
Resolv Exploit Aftermath
The State of Yield
In light of what happened with the Resolv exploit, I didn’t want to write my usual yield curation brain dump and carry on like nothing happened. That said, I’ll still try to make this useful.
Something I’ve wrestled with a lot when it comes to yield is whether or not it’s worth it.
As in, who cares about 3% - 4% DeFi yield if your entire principal is at risk? Why not just sit in T-bills with way less surface area risk?
Another interesting question to ask, as we’ve seen yields compress and centralize across DeFi, is: where is the yield even coming from right now?
If you have 10 minutes, give this a read from Vadym - Yield is falling from Sky… but where is it coming from?
A great visual from the article I shared above. We really have fulfilled the “money lego” prophecy. There’s a lot of composability happening in this image.
OK, despite my somewhat negative tone, I don’t think this needs to be an overcorrection, pendulum-type moment, but there’s a lot for individuals to weigh when deciding whether chasing yield makes sense.
Unfortunately, one of my favorite images that sums this all up is this one (which I’ve posted here before):
We need DeFi to move past the harsh reality of the chart above. I’m an eternal optimist, so I’m hopeful we’ll get there. For example, the things we’re talking about now are quite a bit different from what we talked about in the 2020 era of DeFi (although oracles are still wreaking havoc). We’ve grown up a lot, and the industry as a whole should be proud of where we’re at. But there’s still a lot of work to do to go that final mile.
So What Am I doing?
I’m going to write a longer-form piece about this probably next week. I’m currently not as hungry for yield, but I’ll continue to write YOTW for those who are. I also enjoy writing it, as it’s a forcing function that gets me to look at new things every week.
Personally, I think this is a great time to be DCA’ing into long-term positions you maybe felt you missed the boat on.
Essentially something like this:
A portion of my strategy moving forward will probably center around Ether.Fi, but I will write it up in a bit more depth for those who might be interested.
Resolv Exploit Aftermath
Huge shoutout to the YAM account for putting up the first signal flare for this exploit:
A brief summary of what happened:
At 02:21 UTC on Sunday, March 22, an attacker deposited roughly $200,000 in USDC into the Resolv protocol. The protocol minted 80 million USR in return. Within 17 minutes, USR crashed from $1.00 to $0.025 on Curve Finance. The attacker walked away with approximately $23 - 25 million. Eighteen audits had reviewed Resolv's contracts. All of them confirmed the code worked as designed. The attack surface wasn't the smart contract. It was a private key stored in AWS.
The above quote is from the Nexus Mutual team. If you’re curious as to whether insurance would cover something like this you can give this report a read:
For those who do not want to read the whole report, the answer is: NO
Insurance doesn’t cover this.
Despite having 18 audits, this wasn’t a smart contract failure. This was an OpSec failure. I talked to the author of the Nexus Mutual report about this and this was their respsonse:
They did have 18 audits, which covered different parts of the codebase. The issue is smart contract auditors typically leave privileged actions out of scope. This is an OpSec issue, not a smart contract issue.
50% of all onchain losses across CEXes, CeFi, and DeFi come from private key compromise/multisig compromise in some part of the system or a wallet that has ownership over a proxy contract.
If teams took OpSec more seriously, we could cut down onchain losses significantly.
OpSec-related losses have been the leading cause of loss for the last 3 years in DeFi.
A great place to start for getting better with OpSec:
I won’t go into all my OpSec, but I personally use a Grid+ Lattice1 for all my signing and have a dedicated crypto computer that is only used for crypto and another laptop that I use for web surfing and my day to day work.
Btw, no affiliation whatsoever to Grid, but the product is amazing. I can’t see myself ever switching.
I also still have some Ledger wallets and I have hot wallets for trying out new protocols.
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An interesting trend emerged in the chaos right after the exploit became widely known. Many protocols rushed to X to say they weren’t affected. But what stood out was that some teams didn’t just make claims, they shared links to their Accountable dashboards as proof they had no impairment or exposure.
It removes the “trust me bro” element and replaces it with real, verifiable transparency. Just like the Neutrl team did here:
The Accountable team wrote a great article about this as well right here:
Another thing thing that caught my eye was that the Credora team had given USR a junk rating almost a full year ago back in May of 2025. However, even though Credora gave USR a low grade, it still missed the actual vulnerability that was exploited:
I’m going to end things there for this week. I’ll be back next week diving into new and exciting DeFi, but I think I needed a bit of a self-imposed breather.
Hopefully the events of this week only make DeFi stronger going forward. 🫡
DISCLAIMER: Nothing written in The Edge Newsletter or said on The Edge Podcast is a recommendation to buy or sell tokens or securities. This content is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing shared here is financial advice. Any views expressed in our content are solely the opinion of that writer, host, or guest. Always do your own research. DeFi Dad, Nomatic, and guests may have positions in the assets or other matters discussed in this content.
