Lending app tries to take over ‘whale’ a/c to halt crypto collapse

The record-setting rout in cryptocurrencies has put a slew of decentralised-finance (DeFi) applications and their communities in a race to protect themselves against a cascade of liquidations — sometimes by employing unprecedented measures.

On Sunday, token holders of Solend, a lending app on the Solana blockchain, voted to temporarily take over a so-called “whale” investor that it said could significantly influence market movements, an extreme move for DeFi that appears to be a first. That decision was reversed in a second vote on Monday.

That all took place after MakerDAO, an app that supports stablecoin DAI and is run by a crypto community that formed one of the first decentralised autonomous organisations, suspended the token from being deposited and minted in DeFi crypto lending platform Aave.