April was a bloodbath for decentralized finance (DeFi), especially on Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH).
Hackers stole more than $606 million from crypto protocols in the first 18 days alone, the worst monthly total since early 2025
As much as $13 billion in capital fled from DeFi protocols afterward. On May 12, the Ethereum Foundation launched a new standard to eliminate one of the poor security practices that’s supposedly partially to blame for some of April’s hacks. Here’s what that means for Ethereum moving forward and how it changes the investment picture.
The fix addresses a real flaw When you self-custody your crypto and approve a transaction in most crypto wallets, you see a combination of wallet addresses (which are long strings of letters and numbers) and hexadecimal codes, which, to put it lightly, aren’t easily decipherable at a glance by default. Thus, frequently enough, immediately before pushing the button to finalize a transaction, on the basis of the information in front of you, you don’t know whether you’re swapping tokens as desired, or whether you’re handing control of your wallet to an attacker. This is the source of many problems.