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Lending your car to a friend might seem like no big deal.
But let's say that friend secretly gives your keys to someone else, and suddenly five strangers are joyriding in your sedan.
Pretty soon, you've lost track of where your car is, who's driving it, or whether it's ever coming back.
That's basically what's happening in DeFi right now, thanks to the meltdown at Stream Finance.
Stream Finance was a DeFi platform experimenting with synthetic stablecoins - crypto tokens designed to track the value of a dollar, but backed only by algorithms and crypto collateral instead of actual USD.
Their flagship token, xUSD, was meant to stay pegged at $1. In theory, it offered users a stable, decentralized dollar they could lend, borrow, or trade across protocols.
The catch? Stability depended entirely on Stream's internal systems and how other projects used its tokens.
Now, Stream wasn't operating in isolation. Its synthetic assets - including xUSD - became integrated into major lending and yield platforms like Euler, Silo, and Morpho.
That meant users across multiple protocols were holding or using Stream's tokens without necessarily realizing how dependent they were on Stream's own balance sheet and risk management.
Then, something terrible happened: Stream reported a $93M loss and suddenly froze deposits and withdrawals.
Confidence evaporated overnight. xUSD dropped to $0.33 within hours.
And because this stablecoin was integrated into other platforms, the collapse didn't stop at Stream. Other protocols tied to xUSD, like TelosC and Elixir, were left nursing massive losses, their liquidity pools drained or devalued.
In total, blockchain analysts from Yields And More uncovered around $284M in tangled exposure across the network.

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Source: Elixir |
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The lesson to take from this:
DeFi is made to remove middlemen, not to remove risk. When you swap banks for code, you trade human error for systemic design risk.
"Trustless" doesn't mean "safe" - it means you are the risk manager now.
Be careful with who you give the car keys.
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