Euler Finance TVL Rises 38x in 3 Months

Euler, a decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol, is on its way to recovery after a $200 million hack in 2023 wiped out its financials.

After its v2 launch in September, Euler’s total value locked (TVL) is up 38x to $133 million, from just $3.5 million, and is now the 23rd largest lending protocol by TVL, according to DeFiLlama. Total DeFi TVL grew by 45% in that time.

The growth was partially catalyzed after the implementation and incentivization of Resolv Labs’s products, USR, and wUSR on Dec. 14. Euler’s TVL is up 98% since the week of the implementation, which incentivizes users to lend Resolv market USDC and USR for up to $20,000 in rewards provided by the market’s governor, Apostro. Resolv Labs is a stablecoin protocol that maintains the $490 million USR stablecoin.

Euler’s v2 pioneers the product’s relaunch, and introduces a modular design of their lending vaults, giving users more flexibility in collateral and governance management.

“The protocol itself is agnostic about this functionality. This means lenders that want truly immutable markets can opt for those in full transparency, knowing that if something goes wrong, they will need to manage their own risk,” Euler said in X. “But for lenders that want more active risk-management, they can opt for governed markets with a risk manager they trust to act in their best interests.”

Euler’s hack in March 2023 wiped out the protocol’s TVL, as roughly $200 million was stolen via a flash loan attack that exploited a vulnerability in the protocol’s smart contracts.

Less than a month after the initial exploit, the hacker returned over 95% of the exploited funds, and due to a 20% rise in ETH’s price since the hack occurred, the hacker ended up sending a larger USD amount back to Euler than what was originally stolen.

Euler, which launched in December 2021, raised $40 million across three funding rounds between 2020 and 2022, including from Paradigm, Coinbase Ventures, and Jane Street Capital.

The lending platform’s co-founder and CEO Michael Bentley spearheaded the v2 launch of Euler, which allows developers to build their own iterations of borrowing and lending markets.