Decentralized finance (DeFi) has its fair proportion of ‘forks,’ however not often do they prime the overall worth locked (TVL) charts. Linea, the zero-knowledge rollup ‘bootstrapped’ by Consensys, claims to be ‘home to the most innovative web3 projects.’ However its largest venture, ZeroLend, is a seemingly low-effort fork of Aave, the widely-established lending protocol.
As famous by X (previously Twitter) person @majinsayan, ZeroLend’s cell web site till very not too long ago even redirected to Aave’s personal FAQ part.
At $235 million TVL, ZeroLend accounts for over a 3rd of the blockchain’s whole $667 million TVL, in line with information from DeFiLlama.
‘Forking,’ widespread in DeFi, is the apply of copying an present venture’s code for reuse and, ideally, additional improvement.
Oft-forked Aave is the largest protocol in DeFi — ignoring Lido and Eigenlayer which provide ETH staking and re-staking, respectively — with $11.6 billion of TVL throughout 12 chains.
Many forks of Aave, and related lending protocol Compound, have been deployed through the years, and have typically fallen sufferer to hackers. Current examples embrace Radiant Capital, which misplaced $4.5 million in January, and Michael Patryn’s UwU Lend, which was hacked for $20 million one month in the past.
Learn extra: Sifu’s UwU Lend reportedly hacked for $20M, Curve’s Egorov amongst affected
Regardless of this, the unique codebases are broadly thought-about amongst probably the most safe within the sector, with any adjustments solely doable through decentralized governance and on-chain voting.
Whereas this can be comforting for even probably the most risk-averse crypto customers, equivalent to addresses labeled because the US authorities, it’s not with out its personal issues, provided that any bug fixes take time to implement.
Learn extra: Compound Finance improve bug freezes $830M in crypto
Pals don’t fork buddies
Again in March, Aave governance delegate Marc Zeller described ZeroLend as “the Aave codebase with a high inflation shitcoin slapped on top.”
The remark got here in response to ZeroLend’s governance discussion board publish suggesting that Aave acknowledge them as a ‘friendly fork,’ providing to share income and a portion of their ZERO token airdrop in return.
Zeller didn’t appear eager on the popularity threat in associating Aave with one of many many unsanctioned spin-offs, nonetheless, hazarding that ZeroLend “only has one likely outcome, onboarding the wrong collateral or Oracle, or pushing a wrong config and getting featured in Rekt News.”
ZeroLend had been searching for the same setup to MakerDAO’s SparkLend, which has been endorsed by Aave below the same income sharing proposal because it handed in March 2023.
Regardless of this, Spark additionally discovered itself on Zeller’s radar final week. He accused MakerDAO of ‘creative accounting,’ resulting in a income share calculation at ‘much closer to 1%,’ somewhat than the agreed upon 10%.
Zeller isn’t any stranger to inter-DAO controversy, hitting out at Gauntlet and Morpho earlier this yr, and criticizing the identical pair’s threat administration technique within the wake of Renzo’s ezETH depeg. He then branded as “reckless” MakerDAO’s choice to onboard Ethena’s ‘synthetic dollar’ as collateral.
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