News linked to this event type.
According to an analysis by SlowMist founder Yu Xian (@evilcos), the core of the recent KelpDAO hack—resulting in approximately $290 million stolen—was a targeted poisoning attack against the downstream RPC infrastructure of LayerZero’s DVN (Decentralized Validator Network). The specific attack steps were as follows: First, the attackers obtained the list of RPC nodes used by LayerZero’s DVN; second, they compromised two independent RPC clusters and replaced their op-geth binary files; third, using selective spoofing techniques, they returned forged malicious payloads exclusively to the DVN while serving legitimate data to all other IPs; fourth, they launched DDoS attacks against uncompromised RPC nodes, forcing the DVN to fail over to the poisoned nodes; finally, after the forged messages were validated, the malicious binary self-destructed and erased its logs. As a result, LayerZero’s DVN signed validations for transactions that “never occurred.”
Currently, the LayerZero Labs DVN has resumed operations and announced that it will no longer sign or verify messages for applications still using the 1/1 configuration. LayerZero has collaborated with multiple law enforcement agencies worldwide and is actively assisting in tracking the stolen funds.
According to on-chain analytics platform Lookonchain (@lookonchain), an OTC whale previously purchased 163,405 ETH (approximately $440 million) and 4,000 cbBTC (approximately $296 million). Due to the KelpDAO rsETH cross-chain bridge vulnerability, this whale was unable to withdraw ETH normally from Aave and was forced to discount-swap 7,438 aEthWETH (approximately $16.83 million) for 1,930 stETH and 5,272 ETH, incurring a loss of approximately 237 ETH (about $540,000). The whale has since withdrawn 98,032 wstETH (approximately $272 million) and 3,000 cbBTC (approximately $221.6 million) from Aave, leaving 10,000 ETH (approximately $22.8 million) still deposited in Aave.
Odaily News France has become a hotspot for wrench attacks, with at least 41 cryptocurrency-related kidnappings and home invasions reported this year, averaging one incident every 2.5 days. Jean-Didier Berger, the Deputy Minister of the Interior, stated that a series of new measures are being prepared with Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez to address this issue.A wrench attack refers to the use of physical violence to force victims to transfer crypto assets. Data from Certik and Jameson Lopp shows that globally, there were 72 verified cases of physical coercion in 2025, a 75% year-on-year increase, with cases involving physical assaults rising by 250%. Ledger co-founder David Balland was kidnapped in France in January 2025. Security researchers point out that attackers are shifting from targeting wallets to hunting individuals, using social media and leaked data to identify targets. Due to the irreversible nature of crypto transactions, attackers often convert illicit proceeds into stablecoins and transfer them across chains to evade tracking. Experts recommend using tools such as multi-signature wallets, withdrawal delays, and spending limits to reduce the risk of attack.
According to official news, the Polygon team has been actively monitoring the rsETH vulnerability: neither the Polygon Chain, Agglayer, nor the broader ecosystem including Katana and Vaultbridge have been affected by this incident.
According to a post by 0xngmi, founder of DefiLlama, following the hack of KelpDAO, Aave is facing severe pressure in handling bad debt. Currently, there are three potential solutions: First, socializing the loss across all users—this would result in an 18.5% impairment for users, generating approximately $216 million in bad debt. Aave’s Umbrella Insurance could cover $55 million, and the treasury could contribute an additional $85 million, leaving a shortfall of roughly $76 million. Second, executing a “rug pull” on rsETH holders on L2 chains—this would generate approximately $341 million in bad debt, with Arbitrum, Mantle, and Base markets suffering the heaviest losses. Third, returning assets to holders based on a pre-attack snapshot—but this approach is extremely operationally challenging, and even after Umbrella Insurance coverage, an estimated $91 million in losses would remain. Additionally, some suggest confiscating the hacker’s collateral to offset part of the bad debt. Meanwhile, Aave’s OG Security Module still holds approximately $300 million worth of AAVE tokens; applying a 20% reduction would provide an additional ~$60 million in loss coverage.
Odaily News: A LayerZero cross-chain bridge related to Kelp DAO was hacked on Saturday, resulting in 116,500 rsETH worth $291 million flowing to a new wallet. The hacker used the illicitly obtained rsETH as collateral to borrow on Aave, causing the utilization rate of Aave's core lending pool to reach 100% and triggering a liquidity crunch. According to monitoring by 0xngmi, as of early Sunday, the net withdrawal amount from Aave had reached $6.2 billion. Kelp DAO has suspended the rsETH contracts on the Ethereum mainnet and several L2 networks. Affected by this, the price of the Aave token fell 16% to $90.13, and the price of Ethereum dropped 2% to $2,300. Currently, Justin Sun has posted on platform X attempting to negotiate with the hacker.
According to an official announcement by Orca, Vercel—the frontend hosting provider for Solana’s liquidity protocol Orca—recently experienced a security incident involving unauthorized access to its internal systems. Orca stated that, as a precautionary security measure, it has proactively rotated all keys and deployment credentials potentially compromised in the incident. Orca emphasized that this incident affected only the frontend hosting layer; the on-chain protocol and user funds remain unaffected. The team is currently monitoring the situation closely and will provide timely updates.
According to an official announcement from Curve Finance, due to a hacker attack on the rsETH LayerZero infrastructure, Curve Finance has suspended its LayerZero infrastructure for security reasons, pending further investigation into the root cause before resuming operations. This suspension affects the following: cross-chain bridging of CRV tokens from BNB Chain, Sonic, Avalanche, Fantom, Etherlink, and Kava (chains using native bridges remain unaffected), as well as the crvUSD fast bridge functionality (the L2 slow bridge remains fully operational). Meanwhile, KelpDAO is also reported to have suffered a vulnerability exploit involving approximately $291 million; the exact extent of losses is still under investigation.
23pds, Chief Information Security Officer of SlowMist Technology, retweeted: “The unauthorized access to Vercel’s internal systems appears linked to an internal data leak.” The related tweet states that someone claiming to be “ShinyHunters” on BreachForums is offering for sale—reportedly for $2 million—a purported Vercel internal database, access keys, source code, employee accounts, API keys, NPM tokens, and GitHub tokens. The data allegedly pertains to Vercel’s internal Linear system and internal user management system. Earlier reports indicated that Vercel, a cloud hosting platform, disclosed unauthorized access to its internal systems, affecting a small number of customers.
According to an official announcement, cloud hosting platform Vercel confirmed a security incident involving unauthorized access to certain internal systems. At present, only a small number of customers have been confirmed affected, and Vercel is directly communicating with those customers. Vercel stated that its services remain fully operational; it has launched an investigation, engaged incident response experts to assist with remediation, and notified law enforcement authorities. Vercel recommends that all customers review their environment variables and use the sensitive environment variables feature to strengthen security protections.
According to an official announcement, Curve Finance has suspended its LayerZero infrastructure as a precautionary measure following a hacker attack on rsETH’s LayerZero infrastructure, pending further investigation into the root cause. This adjustment affects cross-chain CRV bridging initiated from chains including BNB, Sonic, Avalanche, Fantom, Etherlink, and Kava; bridging from other chains remains unaffected and continues to use native bridges. Additionally, the crvUSD fast bridge is impacted, while the slower bridge to L2s remains fully operational.
Liquid Capital founder Yi Lihua posted on X, stating that preserving principal is crucial during bear markets. He pointed out that on-chain theft incidents occur frequently, and ignoring risks solely to chase a few percentage points of returns could result in principal loss. JackYi emphasized that all investments carry risk—including holding funds on exchanges or participating in wealth management products and mining. He stressed that the top priority right now is setting take-profit and stop-loss levels, and proactively planning contingency measures for worst-case scenarios to avoid losing principal before the bull market arrives.
According to a post by Lido, the Lido Earn team is aware of the developments regarding the Kelp DAO exploit, and earnETH has exposure to rsETH. As a precautionary measure, additional deposits to earnETH have been paused while the situation is being assessed with relevant partners. More details will be announced later.
According to on-chain analyst Yujin (@EmberCN), ZRO—the native token of LayerZero, the cross-chain bridge exploited by hackers in today’s rsETH vulnerability incident—fell 18% on the day, dropping from $1.90 to $1.50. Twenty minutes ago, a Polymarket user with the address “greenrooibos” deposited 978,000 ZRO tokens to Binance, valued at approximately $1.57 million. These ZRO tokens were withdrawn from Binance two weeks ago, when they were worth roughly $2.04 million; this deposit thus corresponds to a loss of approximately $470,000.
Keone Hon, co-founder of Monad, stated that if a pooled lending protocol allows an asset to be deposited as collateral, it should impose rate limits on the increase in supply rather than opening up to the maximum supply cap all at once. For example, if the current supply is $100 million and the cap is $300 million, the supply should only be allowed to increase to $110 million within the next 10 minutes. He noted that this approach would limit the scale of possible withdrawals in the event of a hack targeting heterogeneous assets—particularly those exploiting infinite minting vulnerabilities—thereby constraining the impact of such attacks. Keone Hon believes lending protocols are typically the largest exit channel for associated assets. Implementing a “smart cap”—initially set slightly above the current supply and gradually adjusted over several hours to the true cap—would significantly improve risk control and could have prevented today’s ~$200 million loss for rsETH depositors.
Axelar Network stated that the hacker attack and theft of funds undermine users’ overall trust in blockchain systems and slow down the adoption of the global ledger it envisions. Axelar expressed its support for the LayerZero team in navigating this difficult situation and rebuilding trust. Regarding this approximately $290 million attack, Axelar emphasized that—pending final forensic findings—the incident once again highlights the need for multi-layered security in cross-chain bridge construction. This includes ensuring operational security for bridge operators, validators, and validating nodes; providing proper incentives and training; and removing validators whose technical capabilities are not adequately demonstrated. Additionally, operators must be sufficiently numerous, structurally heterogeneous, diverse, and geographically distributed to prevent ultimate control by a single entity.
Odaily News Trader 0xSun posted stating that news-driven trading remains one of the more cost-effective strategies in the current crypto market, with its core lying in the directionality and volatility brought by events.Reviewing several recent events, including abnormal ETH transactions, Arc fee adjustments, TAO ecosystem changes, RAVE-related investigations, and the KelpDAO security incident, all triggered significant price fluctuations within a short period. He believes that participating in such opportunities relies on either the speed of information acquisition or the ability to judge the impact of events.Furthermore, he indicated that as the recent altcoin market has gradually cooled down, he has resumed the strategy of going long on BTC while hedging by shorting some altcoin assets. He believes that against the backdrop of relatively weak liquidity and the fading of certain narratives, the overall performance of altcoins may face relatively more pressure.
According to on-chain analyst Onchain Lens (@OnchainLens), Kelp DAO lost approximately $294 million in the cross-chain bridge exploit. As a result, $ZRO dropped from $2 to $1.40. A whale holding a long $ZRO position on HyperLiquid was partially liquidated, incurring a loss of $2.88 million. The whale still holds the position, with an unrealized loss exceeding $750,000 and a total loss of approximately $28.98 million.
LayerZero tweeted that it is aware of the rsETH vulnerability incident and has been actively collaborating with the KelpDAO team on response and remediation efforts since the incident occurred, while continuing to monitor the situation. LayerZero stated that, aside from the rsETH-related incident, all other applications remain secure. Regarding the root cause of the incident, LayerZero is jointly investigating with SEAL_Org and other parties, and pledged to jointly publish a comprehensive post-mortem report with KelpDAO once all information has been gathered.