This one doesn't have a silver lining. On June 1, 2026, the Radiant Capital DAO announced it was winding down operations — ceasing all active development after failing to recover stolen funds or secure new capital following the October 2024 exploit that drained roughly $50 million from the protocol. The shutdown marks the end of what was once one of the more ambitious cross-chain lending projects in DeFi.
RDNT is currently trading at approximately $0.00168, down 3.45% in the past 24 hours — a shadow of its former self. The token peaked near $0.50 in 2023. The collapse from there to effectively zero is one of the starkest examples of what a single catastrophic exploit can do to a protocol's trajectory.
How the Attack Unfolded
In October 2024, attackers compromised Radiant Capital through a highly advanced malware injection that breached multiple developers' hardware wallets simultaneously — a sophisticated supply-chain style attack that bypassed the protocol's multisig security assumptions.
The hack was later attributed to North Korea's Lazarus Group, and on-chain analysis revealed the group had turned the stolen $53 million into over $102 million by the time the shutdown was announced — a grim detail that underscores both the sophistication of state-sponsored crypto theft and the near-impossibility of recovering from it through legal or on-chain means.
The tactics used in the attack subsequently appeared in other major crypto incidents. In April 2026, Drift Protocol said it had medium-high confidence that the same actors behind the Radiant breach were responsible for a separate exploit against its platform — with the group spending months building trust with contributors through conference meetings and professional contacts before deploying malicious tools.
18 Months of Failed Recovery
What makes Radiant's story particularly difficult is that the team genuinely tried. For a year and a half after the exploit, the DAO explored paths to recovery — new capital raises, restructuring options, community governance mechanisms. None of it worked.
The protocol had once ranked among the largest cross-chain lending platforms in DeFi, with TVL reaching $386.8 million in December 2023. By early June 2026, TVL had fallen to approximately $1.4 million across chains, with active loans near $866,000 — effectively an empty shell of what the protocol had been.
The DAO's announcement confirmed there was no viable path forward. Borrowing and incentives have been stopped, and the protocol has entered a maintenance state rather than a full decommission — meaning users can still withdraw funds and manage existing positions, but no new activity is possible.
What Existing Users Need to Do
Radiant Capital has stated it will continue attempts to recover the funds stolen in the 2024 exploit, and affected users can access a remediation portal to seek those funds. That process is likely to be slow and uncertain, but it represents the only remaining avenue for users who suffered losses in the original attack.
For anyone still holding positions in the protocol, the priority is straightforward: existing positions can still be managed, but withdrawal conditions depend on current utilization and market dynamics — and with liquidity declining and yields at zero, waiting carries its own risks. Getting out now rather than hoping for improved conditions is the more prudent approach.
The Radiant shutdown is a case study in what the DeFi industry has been grappling with since the Lazarus Group began targeting protocols systematically — that technical security alone isn't enough when attackers are willing to spend months infiltrating teams at the human level. Hardware wallet compromises across multiple developers simultaneously suggest an operational security failure that no smart contract audit could have prevented.
RDNT's price tells the rest of the story.
Disclaimer: The market is risky, and investment needs to be cautious. This article does not constitute investment advice. Users should consider whether any opinions, views, or conclusions in this article are in line with their specific circumstances. Investment based on this is at their own risk.