DeFi Scam Risk Record: Large Asset Holders Lose Over One Hundred Million USD in Withdrawal Failures

According to BlockBeats News reports, the DeFi ecosystem has once again exposed significant security vulnerabilities. A large investor faced DeFi scam-like risks due to the collapse of the Stream Finance protocol, with asset losses exceeding $107 million. The assets remain fully frozen, and the official team has not provided any solutions.

Single Investor Losses Surpass Group Expectations

This DeFi scam involved a major asset holder with astonishing exposure in Stream Finance and related protocols. According to on-chain address tracking, the investor’s funds are distributed as follows:

• Euler protocol with three addresses holding approximately 82 million USDT (including 57 million USDT at 0xa38d6e3aa9f3e4f81d4cef9b8bcdc58ab37d066a, 3.8 million USDT at 0x0c883bacaf927076c702fd580505275be44fb63e, and 22 million USDT at 0x673b3815508be9c30287f9eeed6cd3e1e29efda3)
• Silo protocol with 233.3 BTC (about $24.5 million) unable to be withdrawn

The investor only realized the platform was in liquidity crisis after learning through news channels about the disclosed loss of $93 million by Stream Finance in early November. When attempting to withdraw, they found the funds could no longer be accessed, and the protocol’s liquidity was completely depleted.

Protocol Design Flaws Cause Withdrawal Mechanism Failure

The structural issue with Stream Finance lies in its withdrawal mechanism, which relies on new capital deposits to release withdrawal limits. However, since the deposit function was disabled, this mechanism has completely failed. Since the last official announcement on November 4th, the team has not issued any further updates or rescue plans, leaving investors in a fully passive state.

Some community investors have started to use technical means to抢占 limited liquidity, even leading to “bot front-running” phenomena. One investor, trusting others’ technical assistance, transferred deposit certificates, which resulted in further asset losses, causing chaos within the community.

Systemic Risks Behind DeFi Scams

Independent analyst YieldsAndMore’s research reveals deeper risk structures. The collapse of Stream Finance involves debt exposures across multiple DeFi protocols totaling $285 million, including:

• TelosC with a $123.6 million exposure
• Elixir with $68 million
• MEV Capital with $25.4 million

The most dangerous single-point risk comes from Elixir’s deUSD protocol, which lent $68 million USDC to Stream, accounting for about 65% of deUSD’s total reserves. If Stream cannot repay, deUSD reserves will face a critical blow.

Recovery Dilemmas Under Decentralization

Due to the decentralized design of protocols like Euler, Morpho, and Silo, regulatory intervention options are extremely limited. Multiple legal teams are preparing lawsuits, but the prospects and progress of fund recovery remain highly uncertain. For affected investors, the current approach is only to continue monitoring through official channels, with no definite timeline for asset unfreezing.

The Cost of Systemic Risks in DeFi Portfolios

This incident once again confirms the systemic flaws within the DeFi ecosystem. Recursive leverage, protocol contagion, and poor risk management have become chronic issues in the industry. Although the Stream team claimed that each dollar position had full redemption rights, such promises are meaningless in extreme cases of underlying asset default.

Creditors often only learn the full risk exposure through third-party analysis afterward, highlighting significant gaps in risk disclosure and real-time auditing within the current DeFi ecosystem. The composability of DeFi is indeed a double-edged sword—while it enables efficient capital recovery in bull markets, it also allows risks to rapidly penetrate multiple layers of protocols, forming complex and unpredictable risk networks, ultimately evolving into large-scale DeFi scam-like risks.