Alice Corsini

DeFi growth & ecosystem strategy. ✨ 10+ years operator, worked w/ @Uniswap, @safe, @dYdX, @arbitrum. 🧑‍🍳 @kpk_io ❤️ Bitter half: @ThomasBertani

[Alice Corsini @alicecorsini_]

Life update: I’m excited to join the @karpatkey Governance team✨

Serving leading DAOs and counting $1.7 Billion in DAO Treasuries, Karpatkey is defining the standard in non-custodial, on-chain asset management.

Looking forward to working with @Coltron_eth, @claberus, @elbagococina and @jameskbh on building a stronger DAO future.

[Alice Corsini @alicecorsini_]

Morpho has an exceptional BD team, no doubt. And, they structured a growth model where every actor in the Morpho ecosystem generates leads. That’s brilliant.

But, Michael’s point that some integrations you can only access with $ is 100% true imo. That takes different forms: plain integration payment, “marketing budget”, incentives, rev share and so on.

[Alice Corsini @alicecorsini_]

Morpho has an exceptional BD team, no doubt. And, they structured a growth model where every actor in the Morpho ecosystem generates leads. That’s brilliant.

But, Michael’s point that some integrations you can only access with $ is 100% true imo. That takes different forms: plain integration payment, “marketing budget”, incentives, rev share and so on.

[Michael Bentley @euler_mab]

I sincerely doubt the number is that high. Insane if so.

But the point about using a low float high FDV token to strike deals for exclusive integrations still stands.

People used to say to me all the time at Euler: “do more BD.”

But lack of integrations almost always was nothing to do with BD efforts. Very few people we didn’t speak to during my time there.

It almost always came down to money. “So and so are offering X millions for an exclusive integration, what can you do?”

I assume most of those types of deals were done with tokens and not real $ because the numbers were often eye watering.

And we had 1/100th of budget or less than competitors because of the depressed EUL token price. So we would always get excluded or pushed aside once someone else came in.

Sometimes people talked to us enthusiastically one day and completely ghost us the next once they’d agreed a deal elsewhere.

With the benefit of hindsight I think we should have tried to take Euler private and start again with the token.

But hindsight is a wonderful thing. It wasn’t the same regulatory environment as we have now and there were lots of arguments against doing that.

The point is that you really need a highly valued token to compete for liquidity and integrations in lending though. The tech is very much secondary to your ability to pay in the early years to bootstrap liquidity and integrations.

It does make me wonder what will happen when all these pay to play token holders start to take profit after vesting ends or hedge out their exposure though.

[Hayden Adams 🦄 @haydenzadams]

Woke up extremely bullish on DeFi and Ethereum today

Uniswap launched in the 2018 bear, when Ethereum sentiment was at all time lows

Uniswap and other defi projects relentlessly built through that bear market and proved how powerful Ethereum can be, catalyzing defi summer and everything since

Now vibes are down bad again and Uniswap intends to build our way out of it. Last time it was by proving defi is possible. This time it will be by proving defi is inevitable.

The internet brought two disruptive changes: existing businesses moving onto the internet, and the formation of new internet-native businesses

The same duality will exist for defi: the tokenization of all existing assets, and a growing vibrant economy of crypto native assets. And it’s all happening right now, with more and more assets being brought onchain, increasing the value and productivity of crypto native assets.

As this digital economy grows, Defi is being integrated everywhere - payment processors, brokerage accounts, asset issuers. It won't stop until we eat the entire global economy

Uniswap the liquidity layer + Ethereum the settlement layer. The perfect combination of low counterparty risk, permissionless, programmable infrastructure

And all this will result in huge growth in protocol volumes and fee generation. Which reminds me:

UNI burn hit all time highs today, after several new sources of protocol fees came online.

And there are many more to come: v4, uniswap x, aggregator hooks, more chains, etc

Now add in all the new assets coming onchain

We're still at the beginning 🦄

[Alice Corsini @alicecorsini_]

@privy_io @Uniswap Uuuh 🔥 love it when two great projects collaborate!

[Alice Corsini @alicecorsini_]

@koeppelmann No. A $10B IPO is an underwriting and distribution problem, not a settlement one. Ethereum solves the leg that was never the bottleneck.

Onchain direct issuance works at $50M, a $10B book needs syndicate distribution it can’t replicate yet.

[Alice Corsini @alicecorsini_]

CeFi: exchanges inflate trading volume.
DeFi: protocols inflate TVL.

Same reason both happen: capital and partners optimize for legible numbers, so teams produce legible numbers. The hard part is that real adoption almost always looks slower than the inflated version.

A protocol with $50M of real TVL beats one with $500M of incentive-rented liquidity. Every cycle. Every time.

Real builders are the long-term winners. But you need a high tolerance for looking smaller than you are.

[L2BEAT 💗 @l2beat]

After the @KelpDAO hack, many projects decided to migrate their cross-chain infrastructure from @LayerZero_Core to @chainlink's CCIP, hoping to improve security for their users.

We decided to study if this is indeed a significant upgrade 👇

[Alice Corsini @alicecorsini_]

@stablenomics @jimchang This is so so so true! Never have I ever had so many calls with BD people based in NY.

[Alice Corsini @alicecorsini_]

I was once asked in an interview why our bridge didn't win.

My answer always starts with this: bridges enabled the multichain DeFi era. Capital movement between Ethereum, BSC, Polygon, and beyond. None of it exists without the bridge layer.

Liquidity mobility.

So the question isn't whether bridges mattered. It's why each generation keeps failing in roughly the same way.

pNetwork was a generation 1 bridge. We processed $ 1B+ in cross-chain volume between 2019 and 2022. By the time we had scale, its design had already been written off. Multichain (Anyswap) collapsed due to key compromise. Ronin got drained due to compromised validator keys. Ren died following the Alameda/FTX collapse.

Same generation, different failure modes, same outcome.

Then came externalised trust and economic security. Nomad lost ~$190M to an initialisation bug. Wormhole got drained for $325M through a signature verification flaw. Everclear (Connext) just wound down.

The hack you watched last month isn't an isolated event.

Every generation removes one assumption and reintroduces it somewhere else. Keys become validators. Validators become oracles. Oracles become economic games. The trust doesn't disappear.

And, composability turned individual failures into systemic ones.

Bridge exploits often cascade. Wrapped assets become unbacked, downstream protocols break.

At the time, the Wormhole exploit required bailout to prevent contagion.

Bridges aren't going anywhere. They're essential infrastructure and they'll keep getting built every cycle. They're also one of the hardest pieces of the stack to get right.

Bridge risk is the line item that deserves the most paranoia when you're building or using DeFi.

That's been true for a decade. It's still true today.

[Alice Corsini @alicecorsini_]

@safetyth1rd compromised keys is one of the top causes of hacks in DeFi history. We should have learned by now.

[KPK @kpk_io]

1/ KPK Morpho v2 vaults just crossed $40M TVL.

Recent growth driven by deposits from @ensdomains, @CoWSwap, @NexusMutual, @Balancer and @superformxyz.

All 7 KPK vaults are live on v2, with rebalancing and exit agents fully ported to the new architecture.

[Alice Corsini @alicecorsini_]

@stacy_muur Tether, MakerDAO, Aave, Morpho, Lido, Ledger, Ready, Euler.

There’s no DeFi without European founders 🙃

[Alice Corsini @alicecorsini_]

@claberus 🫶

[Ethereum Foundation @ethereumfndn]

1/ The Ethereum Audit Subsidy

A joint initiative with audit providers to subsidize the cost of audits for Ethereum builders. Security audits are a best practice, yet expensive. The subsidy program makes audits accessible and strengthens the Ethereum ecosystem.

[Sebastian Bürgel @SCBuergel]

Thank you @safe Shield for keeping @hoprnet assets safu during the DNS hijkacking attack!!!

[Alice Corsini @alicecorsini_]

@PaulFrambot Each DeFi lending generation solved a different problem. With Midnight, Morpho flips the model again.

Curious to see it in action 👀
https://t.co/x0CXczV1jV

[Alice Corsini @alicecorsini_]

Each DeFi lending generation solved a different problem.

ETHLend: counterparty matching.
Aave: liquidity fragmentation.
Morpho: credit expression.

I was around when ETHLend launched — peer-to-peer matching felt like the only way lending could work onchain. Then pools made capital fungible and Aave proved that simplicity scales.

Morpho flips the model again.

You define who you lend to, at what terms, with what collateral. Custom duration, custom risk. Capital becomes intentional rather than pooled.

DeFi lending was built for a world where simplicity was the prerequisite. Now, sophistication is the advantage.

[CoW DAO @CoWSwap]

Users should revoke all approvals made on CoW Swap after 14:54 UTC today. Tools like https://t.co/CGNBLppgWS make this easy to do.

[CoW DAO @CoWSwap]

🚨🚨

UPDATE: CoW Swap experienced a DNS hijacking at 14:54 UTC (approximately 90 minutes ago).

The CoW Protocol backend and APIs were not impacted, but we have paused them temporarily as a precaution.

We are now actively working to resolve the situation. Please continue to refrain from using swap dot cow dot fi until we confirm that it is safe to use.

[Alice Corsini @alicecorsini_]

Most DeFi people don’t realise how limited the tooling and how big the challenges really were for the OG protocols.

Huge respect for the early builders at @SkyEcosystem, @aave, @Uniswap, @Compound_xyz & co.

[Doo | Compound Foundation @DooWanNam]

And I was in the BD room when Dai was still single collateral DAI, and early Multi Collateral DAI before onbaording WBTC and USDC. With limited tools, we couldn't fix the constant depeg whether it's downward or upward, and partners were struggling to adopt it as stablecoin without stability lost its meaning