What happened
On 18 April 2026 an attacker drained 116,500 rsETH (about $290-292 million) from Kelp DAO's rsETH bridge by getting a forged cross-chain message approved. The bridge ran on LayerZero with a 1-of-1 verifier setup: the only required verifier (DVN) was LayerZero Labs' own. The attacker had poisoned the RPC nodes that DVN relied on, so it signed a message claiming 116,500 rsETH had been burned on Unichain when no burn occurred.
The Ethereum adapter then released the tokens. Kelp paused rsETH contracts about 46 minutes after the drain, which blocked a second forged message for 40,000 rsETH. The attacker posted stolen rsETH as collateral on Aave V3 and borrowed WETH against it, which left Aave with bad debt, and the Arbitrum Security Council froze about 30,766 ETH linked to the attacker.
LayerZero attributes the attack to North Korea's TraderTraitor (Lazarus) group. Kelp and LayerZero dispute who is responsible for the 1-of-1 configuration: Kelp says it was LayerZero's documented default, while LayerZero says it had recommended a multi-DVN setup.
How it happened
- On 6 March 2026 the attacker socially engineered a LayerZero Labs developer, harvested session keys and moved into LayerZero's RPC cloud environment, according to LayerZero's incident report.
- The attacker tampered with two internal RPC nodes used by the LayerZero Labs DVN so they served forged chain data to the DVN signing service and normal answers to LayerZero's monitoring tools.
- On 18 April the attacker DDoSed the remaining clean RPC nodes, forcing the DVN to fail over to the poisoned ones.
- The attacker submitted a message claiming 116,500 rsETH had been burned on Unichain. The poisoned nodes backed that claim, and the single required DVN attested to it.
- Kelp's rsETH
OFTAdapteron Ethereum accepted the verified message and released 116,500 rsETH to attacker wallets. - The attacker supplied the rsETH to Aave V3 as collateral, borrowed WETH against it, and moved funds out through Tornado Cash and cross-chain swap services. A second forged message for 40,000 rsETH was blocked after Kelp paused its contracts.
Protocol details
Evidence
- report @PeckShieldAlert incident report x.com
- report @CertiKAlert incident report x.com
- report @murtuza_merc incident report x.com
- report KelpDao - Rekt rekt.news
- report LayerZero Labs KelpDAO Incident Report layerzero.network
- analysis DeFiLlama defillama.com
- analysis Inside the KelpDAO Bridge Exploit chainalysis.com
- analysis Kelp DAO hits back at LayerZero for trying to shift the blame after a massive exploit coindesk.com
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