
$GRVT KelpDAO Exploit Impact on Market Leaders
Onchain lending markets experienced a sharp contraction in 2026, with user-paid fees falling approximately 50% year over year, according to a new report from crypto investment firm 1kx. However, despite the broader downturn, decentralized lending protocol Morpho demonstrated resilience, recording a modest increase in fees during the third quarter.
According to the 2026 1kx Blockchain Revenue Report, lending markets remained relatively stable during the first half of the year before deteriorating significantly in the third quarter, when fees declined 46% compared with the same period in 2025.
The report attributes much of the sector’s weakness to Aave, the leading decentralized lending protocol, which suffered a significant decline in deposits following the KelpDAO exploit in the second quarter of 2026. Although Aave subsequently began recovering lost deposits, the report describes the recovery as gradual, suggesting that the impact of the exploit continued to weigh on the protocol’s performance.
“It looks attractive when IV is high to earn yield on your $BTC, but the premium is high for a reason: The market is pricing big moves,” he said.
He warned that investors employing covered calls during aggressive rallies risk having their bitcoin sold at the option’s strike price, potentially forfeiting further upside. For institutions seeking more predictable returns, Hepworth suggested that structured credit products combining a contractual base return with performance-linked profit sharing could provide a more balanced approach.
“The best structure would be a contractual base return for predictable institutional income, with a hurdle-gated profit-share on top so investors only share in outperformance once that base is delivered,” he explained.

$GRVT DeFi liquidity saw outflows in October, while protocols shifted their holdings. On-chain liquidity moved to Bitcoin-based protocols, as well as to Hyperliquid and Robinhood.
DeFi liquidity is shifting between chains and protocols in October, and taking a step back with a 7% contraction.
The market capitalization of DeFi protocol tokens contracted by a net 8.4% in the past 30 days, while total value locked, around 7% in October, based on CryptoRank data. The value in DeFi is a proxy metric, reflecting both user flows and the value of collateral assets.
DeFi tokens reacted more dramatically, with over 20% in net losses over the past month, while the protocols themselves had smaller outflows of value. The recent slowdown in DeFi cuts short a three-month streak of expanded TVL based on Ethereum staking and lending.
DeFi growth hinges on BTC recovery
For the past month, Bitcoin-based DeFi protocols were the fastest gainers, as BTC held between $80,000 and $85,000. In total, BTC-based DeFi protocols hold $6.19B in value, expanding by 39.19% in the past 30 days.
DeFi collateral was more diverse in 2026, with a growing share on BTC-based lending. | Source: DeFi Llama
For Bitcoin protocols, most older apps remained stagnant, while liquidity flowed to selected venues. For the past 30 days, Surge Credit, Maya Protocol, and Symbiosis were in the green, while other apps showed small outflows below 5%.
For now, most of the BTC-based DeFi still relies on wrapped versions running on Ethereum. However, Aave V4 is seen as a potential alternative, using the Babylon Labs collateral for lending, without wrapping the coins on Ethereum.
Wrapping assets adds another layer of risk, as the collateral is locked in smart contracts that could be attacked. BTC holders are seeking native ways to put BTC to work with lending, without exposing their holdings to that additional risk.
Morpho, Ace draw in more active DeFi deposits
DeFi liquidity has also shifted among protocols, with some apps and chains defying the recent outflows. In the past month, Base flipped Solana as the third-largest liquidity venue, standing behind Ethereum and Bitcoin.
The past month’s most significant growth came from Arc, a newly launched mainnet and liquidity app. Arc expanded its holdings by 21% in October, holding a total of $617.8M as of October 28.
While the leaders Lido and Aave lost their notional TVL, Morpho expanded by over 3% in the past 30 days, showing users moved their funds for specific vaults and liquidity.
Morpho retains the usual rate of daily active users for the past year, which has still not recovered to the levels at the end of 2025. Despite this, the protocol saw wider adoption, based on its integration with other wallets and apps. Morpho has around 16.1K daily active users, close to the baseline for 2026.
DeFi is reinventing its allocations and lending rates, with Morpho offering innovation in lending rates. Recently, the protocol also integrated with Ledger for direct access to some of its vaults. Morpho has also started onboarding tokenized assets as collateral, unlocking additional value beyond crypto collateral.
In 2026, DeFi also had to adapt to a series of chain and protocol shutdowns and redirect users and liquidity, as Cryptopolitan reported. In the past year, staple protocols like Balancer, Radiant, ZeroLend and Seamless shut down, on a mix of hacking losses or low liquidity.
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$GRVT Discord intends to allow the web searchability of some conversations among users of its 63,000 Discoverable Servers. This may help users looking for information that is concealed in the various messages posted in public channels.
However, for various crypto communities that have been dealing with scammers, there is an underlying concern that fraudsters can also take advantage of being able to access that information.
The October 27 announcement is applicable only to Discoverable Servers, which are required to have at minimum 1,000 users and to comply with the requirements of age, activity, and safety. Invite-only communities, private channels, and direct messages are not included. Discord hopes people will find useful answers without having to join a server first.
What changes on November 16 and in December
The implementation will take place in two phases. Starting November 16, all Discoverable Servers will also have a public Server Web Page. The page will start posting AI-generated summaries of conversations from that date forward. By the middle of December, some selected new messages from the public channels could also appear on these pages and in web search results.
Discord guarantees that usernames and avatars will be hidden. Users will be notified by an icon about the participating channels and will be warned before sharing any posts.
Admins can manage what is visible through the Web Presence settings. There are dedicated switches for summaries and for messages. By default, both switches are turned on. Unless admins change the settings, all eligible public channels are included.
Discord also acknowledges that the AI-generated summaries might not be accurate. In the case of crypto projects, it introduces a new issue: an improper summary can mislead people who have never even been on the server.
Where the member opt-out stops short
Members can use one account-wide privacy switch for their messages. This switch is turned off by default for users in the EU/EEA, UK, Canada, Brazil, Australia, and South Korea, while in the remaining majority of regions it is turned on.
Teen accounts are not permitted to activate this switch. The trick is that activating off the messages does not prevent AI-generated summaries from being posted. Only admins have control over those.
There is another restriction. If a member opts out, it does not mean that messages that were already eligible for public display will be removed. Discord users have to delete their own messages if they want to remove them from the Discord pages.
However, search engines can still keep cached copies of them, which contributes to the concerns reported by TechCrunch. Some users would not like their messages to be read by anyone other than members of their community. Meanwhile, Discord said that it does not sell messages to AI companies.
Why crypto communities are already wary
There have always been worries about information from Discord reaching outside parties. A study from 2025 showed that researchers were able to collect over 2 billion messages from approximately 3,167 public Discord servers through their API and process them in a way that ensured anonymity.
Unfortunately, not all data gatherers are doing it for research purposes, like Spy Pet, a service first disclosed by 404 Media in 2024. Spy Pet was scraping Discord conversations across multiple servers and charging only about $5 per access to user information.
For crypto communities, the worry stretches far beyond privacy. The lending protocol Morpho has taken its Discord channels into read-only mode in the wake of several scams. According to one of the co-founders, Merlin Egalite, people continue to be duped by scams while they are simply looking for help, despite existing safeguards.
The danger has been well-documented. Check Point Cyber Security discovered a fraudulent operation in which a fake verification method for the platform Collab.Land was applied against Discord users.
Simultaneously, Chainalysis announced that over the course of 2025, it managed to find at least $14 billion worth of scam transactions on the blockchain network with losses due to impersonation running high, accounting for an increase of over 1,400% from the previous year.