Why not lean into the defi condom narrative (https://twitter.com/hasufl/status/1357703584356442116)? I think it’s clear defi as a whole is iterating too quickly to develop secure software, and test net deployments aren’t a credible simulation of main net conditions. You can burn money trying to transfer smart contract risk; or you can rethink it, turn it into a yield generator.
Imagine Yearn sets up and administers a “defi sandbox”: an evm-enabled L2 with 2 key features, the ability to migrate contract systems to L1 & a 24 hour delay on asset withdrawals (subject to seizure by yearn governance). The first is to make the sandbox an attractive place to launch new features/products. To this end, major price feeds and contract systems would need to be replicated in some form within the sandbox. As to the delay: essentially, when tokens are deposited into the sandbox they get wrapped. An attacker can’t immediately run away with their profits after exploiting contracts in the sandbox. This introduces a lot of, understandably, unpalatable trust assumptions; however I think it opens up a lot of interesting avenues in return.
Wrapping tokens in this way enables synthetic flash loans, and potentially many new forms of synthetic liquidity freely available within the sandbox. Liquidity that would otherwise prefer to stay on L1 or off-chain entirely, could be attracted by the different risk profile that the “defi condom” offers. Additionally withdrawal seizures/victim reimbursement could be limited, e.g. yearn limited to seizing say 90% of a withdrawal. This would reintroduce at least some of that adversarial element that testing in production gives you, transforming the seizure functionality from bailout to retroactive bug bounty. And, of course, yearn stands to earn tx/withdrawal fees for operating the network.
Call it the yZoo: an enclosed, controlled environment where the public can observe (for study or amusement) apes fling shitcoins at one another, all behind the safety of a thick glass pane. But please… don’t tap the glass, it agitates the apes.