Why does a fishing trip reveal the contradictory essence of whether DeFi can achieve "both fish and bear's paw"? The Venus Attack Revelation

A whale from Venus Protocol was attacked by phishing, resulting in a loss of tens of millions of dollars. The protocol intervened urgently, forcibly liquidating the attacker and recovering the funds, but this also raised questions about its decentralized nature. This article is based on a piece written by Rekt News, organized, translated, and authored by Deep Tide TechFlow. (Background: Venus Protocol users suffered a phishing attack with a loss of 27 million dollars, not a hack of the protocol!) (Background supplement: Your computer is helping hackers mine Bitcoin! 3,500 websites have been implanted with "mining scripts", invisibly hijacking users without their knowledge) A whale from Venus Protocol has just learned through a painful experience that the cost of a Zoom call may exceed your mortgage. A malicious video client, a perfectly timed signature, and 13 million dollars disappeared faster than a rug pull announcement. But the turning point in the story is that Venus did not just stand by and watch users being drained and remained indifferent. They shut down their protocol, urgently called for a vote, and completed the most controversial "rescue operation" in DeFi within less than 12 hours. Initially just a seemingly ordinary phishing attack, it ultimately evolved into a masterclass on whether a decentralized protocol can "have its cake and eat it too". When saving the whale means exposing the hidden termination switch within the protocol, who is truly saved? Incident timeline September 2, 09:05 UTC. A whale from Venus Protocol launched their Zoom client, ready to start a new day of DeFi business. But the seemingly innocent video software was quietly compromised, allowing the attacker to access their entire device through a backdoor. The victim signed a delegated authorization transaction—this is a routine operation that occurs thousands of times a day in DeFi. No need to touch the private key to manage your position within the protocol. Generally speaking, signing these agreements happens faster than reading the terms of service. Click. Signature. Instant "Get Liquidated". From signature to financial ruin, it took merely six seconds. A compromised video client just handed over the management rights of a wallet worth 13 million dollars to the patient attacker waiting for the opportunity. Most phishing stories end here—the whale suffers, the attacker disappears, and mockery of the victim continues on Twitter for a week. But this time, the thief's plan was much more ambitious than a simple "clean sweep". What happens when stealing millions of dollars is not enough? Theft operation UTC 09:05:36. Just six seconds after the whale signed their "crypto suicide pact", the attacker initiated a "masterpiece" of Flash Loans. Exploit transaction: 0x4216f924ceec9f45ff7ffdfdad0cea71239603ce3c22056a9f09054581836286. The post-attack analysis from Venus Protocol detailed the attacker's trading strategy: Step 1: Flash borrow 285.72 BTCB—after all, why use your own money? DeFi allows you to borrow millions without collateral. Step 2: Use the borrowed funds to pay off the victim's existing debt while adding another 21 BTCB from the attacker's own account. It seems generous, but it’s actually a cold-blooded "accounting murder". Step 3: Activate delegated permissions. Transfer all of the victim's digital assets—including 19.8 million dollars worth of vUSDT, 7.15 million dollars worth of vUSDC, 285 BTCB, and a long list of other tokens. All of this is completely legal because the "naive" signature from six seconds earlier authorized it. Step 4: A brilliant strike. Use these just-stolen assets as collateral to borrow 7.14 million dollars in USDC based on the victim's remaining BNB. The attacker not only emptied the wallet but also made the victim pay for their own "theft". Step 5: Borrow enough BTCB to pay off the Flash Loan. The transaction completed, the attacker vanished without a trace. An automatic trade, a drained whale, a very satisfied crypto thief—they just turned someone else's life savings into their collateral playground. However, greed often turns the hunter into the hunted. What happens when a "perfect heist" turns into a "suicide mission"? Response measures UTC 09:09, four minutes after the theft occurred, the monitoring systems of HexaGate and Hypernative began to trigger alarms. This was not an ordinary "suspicious transaction detected" alert. This was a five-level alert for a theft worth 13 million dollars, and the security company immediately knew whom to contact. Venus Protocol's response? The nuclear option was activated directly. It took only twenty minutes from the theft to the suspension of the protocol. Venus activated their own termination switch, freezing all core functions of the entire ecosystem. Lending? Stopped. Withdrawals? Terminated. Liquidation? Paused. A user experienced phishing, and the entire protocol came to a halt. This was not just crisis control—it was a financial battle. Venus decisively restricted their own platform, attempting to trap the stolen goods of the attacker. Every vToken held by the hacker instantly turned into worthless scrap paper, locked under Venus's emergency permissions. But freezing the entire DeFi protocol to save a whale? Such a decision cannot be made unilaterally by the development team. Thus, democracy entered the scene: an emergency governance vote. When the community had only twelve hours to decide whether to save a user's wealth through centralized means, can you really call it decentralization? Lightning democracy Venus not only paused the protocol but also convened an emergency "online meeting" that any Web2 crisis management team would envy. They called it "Lightning Vote". After all, nothing embodies "grassroots governance" more than compressing million-dollar decisions into a few hours of heated debate on Discord. The proposal was simple and straightforward: Phase 1: Partial restoration of functions (to prevent users from being liquidated). Phase 2: Forcibly liquidate the positions of the attacker. Phase 3: Conduct a comprehensive security audit to prevent similar incidents from happening again. Phase 4: Fully restore the operations of Venus. Community's reaction? 100% unanimous agreement. Not 99%. Not 98%. Every single vote supported Venus's action plan, as if it were some sort of DeFi version of a North Korean election result. Perhaps this is true consensus, or perhaps it stems from self-preservation. Or when your protocol is bleeding millions of dollars and competitors are circling like vultures, dissent becomes a luxury that no one can afford. By the afternoon, Venus was authorized. Next came the execution of the most controversial liquidation operation in DeFi history: an operation that needed to bypass smart contract rules to forcibly seize the attacker's collateral. The victim fell into crisis due to a mistaken transaction signature, while Venus was about to sign the "death certificate of democracy". What happens when "code is law" meets emergency permissions? Revitalization operation UTC 21:36. Twelve hours after the theft occurred...