Whales Are Bailing: Why AAVE Just Crashed 22% After the $294M KelpDAO Hack
The cryptocurrency trade noticed the most violent hack of 2026 on Saturday night when an unknown perpetrator breached KelpDAO’s safety and drained virtually $300 million price of its liquid staking token, rsETH.
They managed to behave shortly, depositing the stolen funds into a number of lending protocols, borrowing cash in opposition to them, and one in every of them simply skilled a large investor exodus as its personal token crashed laborious.
CryptoPotato explained intimately the occasions that passed off on Saturday night from info offered by the safety consultants at Cyvers. The dangerous actor compromised KelpDAO’s bridge contract, deposited the stolen rsETH into Aave V3, Compound V3, Euler, and different lending protocols, used it to borrow substantial quantities of WETH, and created greater than $236 million in debt.
Although Aave, alongside SparkLend and some different protocols, reacted by freezing sure affected markets, it appears traders have been greater than dissatisfied by the occasions, particularly whales.
Lookonchain information present that a number of giant market contributors holding a large portion of AAVE went on a promoting spree as the asset’s value began to nosedive. A whale recognized as smaugvision bought $2.06 million price of the token for USDC, one other one disposed of $2.05 million, and a 3rd one swapped $1.95 million price of AAVE for $1.18 million in ETH and 10.11 WBTC.
Due to the KelpDAO exploit creating dangerous debt on #Aave, $AAVE has dropped over 18% as we speak.
Whales are dumping $AAVE.
• smaugvision bought 20,015 $AAVE for two.06M $USDC at $103 avg.
• Whale 0xFC56 bought 20,000 $AAVE for two.05M $USDC at $103 avg.
• Whale 0xA2E4 bought 19,666 $AAVE… pic.twitter.com/NUjWxIgdp0
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) April 19, 2026
These appreciable market gross sales solely exacerbated AAVE’s value decline. The token had peaked at virtually $120 yesterday, however crashed to $103 when the preliminary gross sales started. Shortly after, it plunged to $92, which represented a 22% decline from prime to backside to date.
AAVE has fallen out of the prime 50 alts by market cap as its personal has plummeted to simply over $1.4 billion on CoinGecko.
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