Five Months After the Kelp Hack, Aave Is Still Down $8 Billion

Deposits on Aave stood at $18.1 billion as of this writing, which is approximately 31% below the $26.1 billion it held the day before April’s Kelp hack, according to DefiLlama. The lender’s own code never failed.

What failed was the collateral behind its loans, in a place those loan contracts could not check. Deposits on Aave (TVL).

Source: DefiLlama What the Kelp Hack Actually Broke On April 18, attackers went after how Kelp DAO’s cross-chain bridge checked incoming messages, not its lending logic. Kelp is a liquid restaking protocol, and rsETH is its receipt token.

$AAVE dropped 20% today after the KelpDAO rsETH exploit.The exploit triggered a wave of whale selling and a record spike in $ETH utilization across the lending protocol.Th @aave team told BeInCrypto that the situation is contained to the V3 ETH market only, with V4 completely… pic.twitter.com/LvDCDHCdmN— BeInCrypto (@beincrypto) April 19, 2026 An rsETH holder does not hold ether.