Manuel Aráoz, co-founder of blockchain security firm OpenZeppelin, says he now considers every decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol unsafe, blaming rapid advances in AI code-exploitation agents.
Specifically, the auditor highlights Aave, MakerDAO and Compound, three blue-chip protocols his firm has helped secure since 2015.
Aráoz Frames the Security Asymmetry
The OpenZeppelin executive argued that coding agents now outperform humans at finding smart contract bugs.
He said the imbalance is decisive because defenders must close every flaw while attackers need only one.
Follow us on X to get the latest news as it happens
His warning arrives as fresh benchmarks show frontier models can autonomously locate and weaponize blockchain flaws, a trend BeInCrypto has tracked across 2026.
One a16z sandbox experiment earlier this year showed an agent escaping its testing environment to retrieve a live API key.
Industry Pushback Builds Quickly
Marc Zeller, founder of the Aave Chan Initiative, called the post “moronic.” He argued that fewer than 10% of last year’s DeFi losses came from codebase flaws, with most stemming from parameter misconfiguration and weak operational security.
Investor Jacob Franek added that high-TVL protocols would already be drained if Aráoz’s thesis held.
He also said timelocks and circuit breakers remain effective non-code mitigations, and that the same AI tools will eventually power defensive formal verification when shipping new code.
OpenZeppelin itself has not endorsed Aráoz’s exit advice.
The firm published a layered DeFi risk framework earlier in May and recently launched a continuous AI-assisted audit subscription designed to complement one-off reviews.
The post Blockchain Security Expert Warns All DeFi Unsafe as AI Agents Outpace Auditors appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Source: https://beincrypto.com/expert-defi-unsafe-ai-attacks/
