Governance

JELLY (JellyJelly / JELLYJELLY) is a Solana memecoin launched in January 2025 by Venmo co-founder Iqram Magdon-Ismail that became the center of a major market manipulation incident on Hyperliquid on March 26, 2025. A coordinated trader used a self-liquidation strategy — opening large opposing long and short positions — to force Hyperliquid's HLP liquidity vault to absorb a toxic short, causing up to $13.5 million in unrealized losses before validators emergency-delisted the token and force-settled all positions at a fixed price. The incident triggered widespread criticism of Hyperliquid's decentralization claims and raised systemic questions about perpetuals DEX risk management.

Pendle is a permissionless yield-trading protocol on Ethereum, launched in 2021 by TN Lee and Vu Nguyen, that allows users to separate and trade the principal and yield components of yield-bearing assets. In September 2024, Penpie — an independent yield optimizer built on top of Pendle — suffered a $27 million reentrancy exploit that was made possible in part by Pendle's permissionless market creation design. Although Pendle's own contracts were not directly exploited, the protocol's architecture contributed to the attack surface, and all 11,261 ETH in stolen funds were subsequently laundered through Tornado Cash.

Compound Finance is one of the earliest and most established decentralized lending protocols on Ethereum, launched in 2018 and governed since 2020 by a DAO around the COMP token. The protocol's smart-contract core has never suffered a direct exploit of user funds, but it has been repeatedly hit by operational and front-end security failures — a costly 2021 token-distribution bug, a 2023 X/Twitter account compromise used for phishing, a 2024 DNS hijack of its website, and a 2024 governance controversy in which a whale-backed group used purchased voting power to pass a treasury allocation over community objections. Combined with declining total value locked and a 2023 leadership departure, these incidents warrant continued scrutiny even though the underlying lending contracts have a long audit history and no reported loss of user deposits from a core-protocol hack.

Sui is a Layer 1 blockchain developed by Mysten Labs, launched in May 2023 and built on the Move programming language. The network suffered one of the largest DeFi exploits of 2025 when Cetus Protocol — its primary DEX — was drained of approximately $223 million in May 2025, triggering a controversial emergency validator vote to freeze and reclaim stolen funds that exposed deep centralization concerns. Separately, ZachXBT investigated a $29 million SUI token theft in late 2024 involving Tornado Cash laundering and subsequently announced in July 2025 that he would no longer take Sui ecosystem cases due to inadequate incident-response infrastructure and lack of support from the ecosystem.