The easiest take after a $290 million exploit and a roughly $13 billion slide in DeFi total value locked is that decentralized finance is broken again. It is also probably the laziest. The KelpDAO exploit over the weekend was serious. It appears to have started with a targeted attack on infrastructure used in LayerZero's verification stack, not a smart contract bug as commonly seen in other exploits. LayerZero has preliminarily linked the incident to North Korea's Lazarus Group, and said the attack succeeded because Kelp had opted for a single-verifier setup despite repeated recommendations to use a more resistant configuration. The exploit left rsETH (a liquid staking token issued by KelpDAO) unbacked and triggered fears that bad debt would spill into lending markets, especially Aave's WETH pool (where users borrow wrapped ether against collateral). And yet the more interesting story is not that DeFi was hit. It is that DeFi is still here. Capital fled quickly after the breach. Aave alone experienced $8.45 billion in outflows over 48 hours, while broader DeFi TVL fell into the mid-$80 billion range, roughly back to where the sector sat around this point last year. In other words, this was a sharp repricing of risk, not as destructive as some are making out. Aave, the largest DeFi lending market, had accumulated significant rsETH as collateral in the weeks before the exploit as users built leveraged positions. The scale of that TVL drop also warrants some context. A $292 million theft does not directly produce a $13 billion decline unless a meaningful portion of that TVL was already recycled collateral. Much of Aave's ETH exposure heading into the weekend was concentrated in looping strategies, where users deposit liquid restaking tokens, borrow ETH against them, swap for more restaking tokens, and repeat. In other words, the same pile of assets may be counted multiple times in the TVL calculation. That leverage inflates TVL on the way up and unwinds sharply dur