This DeFi Protocol Just Got Hacked. Its Token Is Still Doing Better than a Major US Bank’s

Holders of Euler (EUL), a low-cap crypto token that lost half its value on Monday after its protocol was hacked, have learned a valuable lesson: No matter how bad things get, somebody has always got it worse.

Enter First Bank, a nearly 40-year-old bank whose stock is down even more badly, despite the fact that it has never been hacked.

First Republic’s 62% swoon led the banking sector’s nosedive Monday as Wall Street digested the collapses of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank, both of which were crypto-friendly. By comparison – and in a completely separate corner of finance – Euler is down roughly 50% following an exploit in which an attacker used a flash loan to plunder nearly $200 million from Euler Finance, a permissionless protocol that facilitates crypto lending and borrowing.

The two assets were the biggest losers in their respective markets on Monday. Elsewhere in the stock market assets mostly traded sideways by session’s close. But in crypto nearly every asset rallied following the news that all bank depositors would be made whole.

FRC and EUL’s price actions underscores how investors’ perceptions of market events can be more influential than the actual events themselves. First Republic has not defaulted, gone insolvent or been seized by the government; in fact, it raised $70 billion over the weekend to shore up its liquidity. Meanwhile, Euler has lost hundreds of millions of dollars that it has little hope of getting back. Yet traders punished FRC shares more severely.