Aave has just done something rarely seen in DeFi history—temporarily manipulating oracle prices through governance voting to fully liquidate all 116,500 rsETH from the Kelp DAO attacker.

In other words, a group of token holders voted to “change the rules to liquidate you.” The liquidated collateral was transferred to a multi-signature address to restore rsETH asset backing and compensate affected users. To date, DeFi United has raised over $320 million to handle the fallout.

What’s interesting here is that a decentralized protocol used an extremely centralized method to “administer justice.” You can call it pragmatic, or you can say it opened Pandora’s box—will the next target of a liquidation vote also be a hacker?