Industry insiders: Key DeFi protocols successfully withstood pressure during the tariff crisis and performed better than TradFi during the crisis

Odaily News The massive sell-off, fueled by Trump’s tariff hikes on major U.S. trading partners, wiped billions of dollars off the crypto industry’s total market value. However, some DeFi founders see this as a bullish sign.
Several developers said that despite ETH falling by at least 35% and SOL falling by about 25%, several key protocols withstood the stress test. Marc Zeller, founder of Aave Chan Initiative (ACI), the Aave contribution team, said in a private message: "Aave's goal is to stay healthy and minimize pain."
In addition, Evan Van Ness, a long-time Ethereum commentator, said: "Except for some isolated incidents of front-end downtime, it is good to see that Sky is running well. In times of crisis, DeFi performs better than TradFi." According to data source Block Analitica, Sky has 19 new liquidation positions involving assets worth more than $8 million. MakerDAO founder Rune Christensen said: "As far as I know, everything is going well."
To put the situation into perspective, risk services provider Chaos Labs said Aave processed about $210 million in liquidations during the market downturn. In comparison, according to a previously released report, about $263 million was liquidated on Aave V2 between December 2020 and December 2022.
“Rapid market volatility resulted in a large number of liquidation events across lending and perpetual swaps markets, marking the largest single day of liquidations ever,” Chaos said in a status report, noting that more than 80% of liquidations occurred on the Aave Ethereum mainnet.
“Most importantly, compared to other venues, Aave does not force close all user positions when liquidation occurs. Only at most half are available for liquidation, thereby mitigating user losses,” Zeller said. According to Block Analytica data, the amounts of these liquidated positions ranged from tens of thousands of dollars to less than $100.
Zeller believes that the performance of the protocol, as well as many other decentralized protocols, shows that the effort to design secure platforms that simply “work properly” is worth it. He noted that the Aave team is working to integrate Chainlink’s smart value recovery solution to make liquidations more efficient and more profitable for the protocol. (The Block)