It's quite different in intent. When you stash crypto within a defi contract that you authored, and that contract states that the crypto can move under certain conditions, and then folks come along and say "hey, I meet those conditions" and move the crypto, then no crime has been committed!
If you didn't want folks to be able to get the crypto under those conditions, then why did you make the contract grant them the crypto in those conditions? I can't take a stack of $100 bills and leave it on the sidewalk with a post-it note saying "only to be picked up by John" and then sue the person named John who comes by and picks up cash. I also can't get mad when Alice sees the stack and tells her friend John to come pick up the money with his name on it.
So it is with crypto. Why are you using crypto if you don't want to follow the rules? That sounds to me like you're trying to do unregistered securities trades...
In the legal system, formation of a contract requires intent. If it can be demonstrated that there was no intent to form a provision of the contract, no "meeting of the minds", then I don't believe it is enforceable. (Though IANAL.)
The point is that there's a pretty big publicly published document informing the world of their intent. It's called a contract, and they said "this will be the rules by which we abide."
It's a very hard battle to say "wow, I didn't intend to have my contract say that, despite writing that and publishing it." You'd have to have a lot of auxiliary material explicitly stating the opposite of what your contract actually said, or you'd have to convince others that what the contact actually says is so difficult to understand that there was no way to anticipate that the contract allows what it does. And even then, I don't know if that'd pass because "I didn't think of that at the time" is commonly not accepted as a way to get out of breach of contract.
I think you’re confusing “smart contracts” with “legal contracts”. They’re not entirely different but exploiting a loophole in a smart contract doesn’t necessarily meet the standard of a legal one.
> To form a contract, there must be: a) an offer and acceptance of said offer; b) consideration for the offer, or some value exchange; c) an intention to form legal relations; and, d) a certainty of the terms of the contract
https://www.canlii.org/en/commentary/doc/2019CanLIIDocs4082
The people who made the smart contract almost certainly wouldn’t tick all four of those boxes definitively. It’d be an interesting civil case probably!
It's actually pretty well established that a typo in a contract doesn't isn't enforceable, particularly if the party trying to enforce it is acting in bad faith.