Decentralized finance (DeFi) has its justifiable share of forks, however not often tops the Whole Worth Locked (TVL) charts. Linea, Consensys’ bootstrapped zero-knowledge rollup, claims to be “dwelling to essentially the most progressive Web3 initiatives.” However its largest mission, ZeroLend, is a seemingly low-effort fork of Aave, the widespread lending protocol.
As famous by X (previously Twitter) person @majinsayan, ZeroLend’s cellular web site even redirected to Aave’s personal FAQ part till just lately.
With a TVL of $235 million, ZeroLend is answerable for greater than a 3rd of the blockchain’s complete TVL of $667 million, in accordance with information from DeFiLlama.
Frequent in DeFi, “Forking” is the follow of copying an present mission’s code for reuse and, ideally, additional improvement.
Often forked Aave is the biggest protocol in DeFi – ignoring Lido and Eigenlayer which supply ETH staking and re-staking respectively – with $11.6 billion in TVL throughout 12 chains.
Many forks of Aave and the same lending protocol Compound have been deployed over time and have typically fallen sufferer to hackers. Latest examples embody Radiant Capital, which misplaced $4.5 million in January, and Michael Patryn’s UwU Lend, which was hacked for $20 million a month in the past.
Learn extra: Sifu’s UwU Lend reportedly hacked for $20 million, together with Curve’s Egorov
Regardless of this, the unique codebases are extensively considered essentially the most safe within the business, with any adjustments solely potential by way of decentralized governance and on-chain voting.
Whereas this can be reassuring to even essentially the most risk-averse crypto customers, reminiscent of addresses labeled as US authorities, this isn’t with out its issues as bug fixes take a while to implement.
Learn extra: Compound Finance improve bug freezes $830 million value of crypto
Pals do not break up pals
In March, Aave board consultant Marc Zeller described ZeroLend as “the Aave code base with a high-inflation shitcoin on high.”
The remark got here in response to ZeroLend’s board discussion board put up, which instructed that Aave acknowledge them as a “pleasant fork,” providing to share the income and a portion of their ZERO token airdrop in return.
Zeller did not appear eager on the reputational threat of linking Aave to one of many many unapproved spinoffs, however he risked that ZeroLend “has just one seemingly final result: onboarding the unsuitable collateral or Oracle, or pushing a unsuitable configuration and getting a function. in Rektnieuws.”
ZeroLend was on the lookout for an identical setup to MakerDAO’s SparkLend, which has been accredited by Aave below an identical revenue-sharing proposal because it was adopted in March 2023.
Nonetheless, Spark was additionally on Zeller’s radar final week. He accused MakerDAO of “artistic accounting,” which led to a income share calculation of “a lot nearer to 1%,” as an alternative of the agreed-upon 10%.
Zeller is not any stranger to DAO controversy. He took a swipe at Gauntlet and Morpho earlier this yr, criticizing the identical pair’s threat administration technique within the wake of Renzo’s ezETH depeg. He then labeled MakerDAO’s choice to onboard Ethena’s “artificial greenback” as collateral as “reckless.”