The decentralized finance (DeFi) industry experienced one of its toughest weeks in months as the total value locked (TVL) on major networks fell sharply.
According to data from Sentora, DeFi protocols on Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, BNB Smart Chain and Base recorded double-digit declines.
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Ethereum Leads DeFi TVL Pullback
This reflected an overall decline in user activity as market conditions changed and security incidents increased.
Additional data from DeFiLlama shows that Ethereum, the largest DeFi ecosystem, has seen its TVL decline by approximately 13 percent to approximately $74.2 billion. Despite the setback, Ethereum still controls over 62 percent of the sector.
Solana and Arbitrum experienced even sharper declines, each losing about 14 percent of their locked value. Their TVL is now around $10 billion and $3 billion respectively.
However, Solana remains the second largest DeFi chain with more than 8 percent market share.
The BNB Smart Chain and Base were also not spared, losing around 10 percent and 12 percent of their TVL, respectively.
As these losses mounted, total DeFi TVL slipped from nearly $150 billion to $130 billion, indicating a significant slowdown in borrowing, lending, and staking activity across the ecosystem.
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Security breaches exacerbate TVL decline
Meanwhile, security breaches exacerbated the TVL decline as a series of serious exploits shocked users and further weakened an already weak market.
On November 3rd, Balancer – one of the oldest DeFi platforms in the industry – suffered one of the biggest attacks of the year. Attackers withdrew more than $120 million from its V2 vaults.
In a detailed statement on This feature allows users to bundle multiple swaps into a single transaction to reduce gas costs.
“Attackers were able to exploit the erroneous rounding behavior in combination with the BatchSwap functionality to manipulate pool balances and extract value. In many cases, the exploited funds remained in the vault as internal balances before being withdrawn in subsequent transactions,” it said in a statement.
At the same time, a second major disruption occurred shortly thereafter when Stream Finance announced that approximately $93 million in assets managed by an external fund manager had disappeared.
In response, the protocol stopped all withdrawals and deposits. It also stated that outstanding deposits would not be processed and began withdrawing the remaining liquid assets.
The fallout spread quickly as Elixir, a DeFi liquidity provider, explained that the incident forced it to suspend its deUSD synthetic dollar stablecoin.
Together, these events increased scrutiny of DeFi’s underlying architecture.
The back-to-back failures highlighted how sophisticated attackers can still exploit design flaws, governance gaps and imperfect smart contract logic. These incidents reinforced longstanding concerns about the sector’s structural vulnerabilities.
