The smart contract security firm distanced itself from Manuel Aráoz’s warning that AI coding agents have made DeFi impossible to defend, calling the threat real but manageable.
OpenZeppelin, a smart contract security firm whose libraries underpin most DeFi protocols, pushed back Tuesday against a viral post by its co-founder and former CTO declaring all of DeFi fundamentally unsafe, clarifying that the claims do not represent the company’s position.
Manuel Aráoz, who co-founded OpenZeppelin and served as its chief technology officer until leaving in 2019, wrote on X on Monday that he now considers “all of DeFi unsafe.” Aráoz argued that AI coding agents have become “superhuman at finding vulnerabilities,” and that smart contract security is too asymmetric: defenders must patch every bug, while attackers need only one exploit to drain funds.
Aráoz said he has been privately advising friends and family to exit all DeFi positions, including so-called blue chips such as Aave, MakerDAO, and Compound.
The post drew wide attention, racking up more than 600,000 views on X, and prompted customers to contact OpenZeppelin directly to ask whether it reflected the company’s stance.
OpenZeppelin Pushes Back
In a thread posted Tuesday, OpenZeppelin said the views expressed by Aráoz “do not” represent the company’s position, and noted that he departed more than six years ago.
“Since 2015, OpenZeppelin has secured over $35 trillion in value transferred onchain,” the company wrote. “We maintain the libraries underpinning most DeFi protocols, and a growing number of innovative financial use cases. Our position is grounded in that work.”
On AI specifically, OpenZeppelin acknowledged the threat but framed it as a double-edged tool.
“AI is a real threat vector, but it is also one of the most powerful defensive tools we have, if used with rigor and expert human judgment,” the company wrote. “Our researchers use AI daily to catch more issues and edge cases. The answer to AI risk is not retreat from DeFi. It is better security.”
Operational Security
OpenZeppelin also offered a pointed reframing of where the real vulnerabilities lie.
“The last month has been a hard one for the industry,” the company wrote. “But most recent incidents trace back to operational security failures, not smart contract bugs. That distinction matters.”
April logged 28 DeFi exploits totaling $635 million stolen, a record by both measures. Many of the largest incidents in recent months have involved compromised private keys and misconfigured access controls rather than flaws in audited contract code.
A StakeDAO exploit on Wednesday that minted 5.4 trillion tokens on Arbitrum, for example, traced to a compromised deployer private key rather than a bug in the protocol’s smart contracts.
OpenZeppelin did not address Aráoz’s specific claims about AI-enabled vulnerability discovery directly, nor did it dispute the asymmetric nature of the attacker-defender dynamic he described.
OpenZeppelin, which has been auditing DeFi protocols since the earliest days of the ecosystem, closed its statement on a forward-looking note. “We have secured DeFi for a decade, and that work now matters more than ever,” the company wrote. “We are in it alongside the protocols, institutions, and developers building the next era of finance.”
