On Tuesday, Marc Zeller, head of integration with decentralized finance (DeFi) borrowing and lending protocol Aave, offers to freeze the platform’s Fantom v3 market. Founded in 2018, Fantom is a directed acrylic graph smart contract platform that provides DeFi services and is currently bridged by Aave.
Zeller explained the reason for the removal of the Fantom Bridge:
“After the Harmony Bridge event and the recent Nomad Bridge exploit, the Aave community should consider the risks/benefits of maintaining an active Aave V3 marketplace on Fantom as this network depends on any (multi-chain) exchange bridge.”
Zeller further explained that the Aave v3 Fantom market has not grown in popularity, with a current market size of $9 million and $2.4 million in open loans. In comparison, the Aave protocol has a total locked value of $3.48 billion. Meanwhile, the Fantom market on Aave only generates around $300 per day for the borrow-lend protocol, of which $30 goes to Aave Treasury.
If passed, the Aave Enhancement Protocol would allow users to pay off their debts and withdraw, but would block further deposits and borrowings in that market. After five days, a community vote will take place to determine the future of Aave v3 Fantom. The Aave team wrote:
“The risk of exposing users to the potential loss of millions of dollars due to causes outside of Aave’s intrinsic security is considered not worth the $30 daily charge accrued by Aave’s treasury.”
Related: Backlash as Harmony offers to mint 4.97 billion tokens to pay back victims
Multi-chain bridging, although hailed by some as a the pinnacle of cross-channel communicationshas been criticized by skeptics such as Vitalik Buterin for its supposed fragility. Earlier on Tuesday, the Nomad symbolic bridge was drained for $190 million after hackers discovered a unique code exploit that anyone could replicate, leading to “decentralized theft” as other users joined in the original hacker’s siphoning of funds.