News linked to this event type.
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.
Sky (formerly MakerDAO) announced on X that it has temporarily suspended the cross-chain bridging functionality for its omnichain fungible token (OFT) USDS. The team will further assess the impact of the recent rsETH security incident. Sky emphasized that its protocol and the USDS smart contract remain unaffected at this time, and USDS continues to be fully collateralized as designed—verifiable on-chain at any time.
Michael Egorov, founder of Curve Finance, stated in a post that he hopes Aave will address the relevant issues. He noted that non-isolated lending offers strong scalability but carries higher risk—the key lies in risk management, an area where Aave has historically performed well. He added that markets could adopt a fully isolated model—like Curve Finance’s—or a hybrid model; although the latter is highly complex, it remains feasible. However, the market has yet to grasp its advantages. Egorov also remarked that Aave v4’s hub-and-spoke model may represent a step toward semi-isolation and greater safety.
Odaily News: Sonic Labs co-founder and Flying Tulip founder Andre Cronje posted on platform X, stating that his team is continuing to investigate the L0/rsETH incident. Preliminary reports indicate that approximately $200 million worth of rsETH was stolen, possibly due to a private key leak or configuration error. The related assets were subsequently deposited into Aave as collateral to borrow ETH (due to insufficient rsETH liquidity).Andre Cronje pointed out that the affected positions are technically still overcollateralized. However, if bad debt occurs, Aave's token mechanism and Safety Module will serve as the first line of defense to absorb the risk. Nevertheless, Aave has no mechanism to subsidize user losses, as doing so could trigger a bank run. Currently, Aave holds approximately $7 billion in ETH with an outstanding borrowing amount of around $100 million, so the overall impact of this incident is limited. Furthermore, prioritizing user liquidity, Flying Tulip has withdrawn all its ETH from Aave to its fund management wrapper contract. This action was taken because Aave's available liquidity had fallen below its set minimum threshold.
According to on-chain analytics platform Lookonchain (@lookonchain), impacted by the KelpDAO incident, the attacker deposited rsETH into Aave and borrowed ETH, resulting in a bad debt on Aave. As a result, several whales have begun urgently withdrawing ETH from Aave. Currently, ETH utilization on Aave has risen to 100%.
According to on-chain analyst Yujin (@EmberCN), after the hacker borrowed a large amount of ETH from Aave by pledging illegally minted rsETH, multiple whale addresses sold AAVE on-chain, causing AAVE’s price to drop 15% that day. Among them, the Polymarket user “smaugvision” sold 20,015 AAVE at an average price of $102.9, worth approximately $2.06 million; address 0xFC5 sold 20,000 AAVE at an average price of $102.8, worth approximately $2.05 million; and address 0xA2E sold 19,665 AAVE at an average price of $99.2, worth approximately $1.95 million.
Odaily News The Ethereum restaking protocol Kelp has officially confirmed suspicious cross-chain activity involving rsETH. It has currently paused the rsETH contracts on the mainnet and multiple L2s and launched an investigation into the attack. It is also collaborating with LayerZero, Unichain, as well as audit firms and security experts to conduct a root cause analysis (RCA). A post-mortem report will be released subsequently.
Regarding the KelpDAO hack, Aave tweeted that the rsETH markets on Aave V3 and Aave V4 have been frozen. Aave stated that its contracts were not exploited and that this incident is related to the exploit of Kelp DAO’s rsETH cross-chain bridge. The freeze will prevent new rsETH deposits and rsETH-backed lending. Aave is currently reviewing lending activity involving rsETH on the platform following the exploit and has indicated that, should the protocol accumulate bad debt as a result, it will explore options to cover the deficit. Earlier reports indicated that Kelp DAO’s cross-chain bridge was hacked, resulting in the theft of approximately $292 million worth of rsETH, exposing Aave V3 to bad debt risk.
According to CoinDesk, Kelp DAO’s LayerZero-based cross-chain bridge was attacked, with the attacker withdrawing 116,500 rsETH—worth approximately $292 million at current prices, or roughly 18% of its circulating supply. This incident has become the largest DeFi attack of 2026 to date. In response, Aave, SparkLend, and Fluid have frozen rsETH-related markets, and Lido Finance has suspended new deposits into its earnETH product. Kelp DAO stated it is jointly investigating the incident with LayerZero, auditing firms, and external security experts.
Odaily News On-chain data indicates that Kelp DAO's rsETH bridge protocol based on LayerZero is suspected of being exploited by hackers, resulting in a loss of 116,500 rsETH, valued at approximately $292 million.
According to a post by Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin) on April 18, 2026, the DNS registrar for eth.limo was attacked. Users are advised to temporarily avoid accessing vitalik.eth.limo or any other eth.limo-related pages until official confirmation of service restoration is provided.
According to an official disclosure by RHEA Finance, on April 16, 2026, the NEAR ecosystem lending protocol RHEA Finance (formerly Burrow Finance) suffered a hack targeting its margin trading functionality, resulting in losses of approximately $18.4 million. The attacker began preparations several days prior to the incident by creating multiple fake token pools on Ref Finance and injecting liquidity into them, thereby constructing malicious swap routes. Exploiting a vulnerability in the protocol’s slippage protection mechanism—which failed to account for scenarios where intermediate tokens were reused during multi-step swaps—the attacker caused borrowed debt tokens to be routed into fake token pools under their control. This triggered widespread forced liquidations, ultimately draining the protocol’s reserve pool. During the attack, the attacker deleted a total of 55 intermediary accounts to obscure their trail. As of now, the attacker has repaid approximately 3.359 million USDC and 1.564 million NEAR to the RHEA lending contract. Additionally, 4.34 million USDT have been frozen—3.291 million frozen by Tether and 1.053 million frozen by NEAR Intents. The protocol’s smart contracts have been paused, and the team is collaborating with centralized exchanges to jointly trace the funds; relevant law enforcement agencies have also been notified.
Odaily News Rhea Finance has released a post-mortem report on the attack, confirming that the actual loss from the vulnerability is approximately $18.4 million, a significant increase from the initial estimate of around $7.6 million.The attacker constructed complex transaction paths, manipulated liquidity using fake token pools, funneled borrowed assets into pools under their control, and returned only minimal assets. This caused a large number of margin positions to rapidly become undercollateralized and triggered liquidations, ultimately depleting the protocol's reserve funds.Approximately $11.2 million in funds have been recovered or frozen so far. This includes some USDC and NEAR assets returned by the attacker, as well as about $4.34 million in USDT that was frozen (with assistance from Tether).
Odaily News Telegram founder Pavel Durov posted on X, stating that the "age verification app" proposed by the EU has design flaws and was compromised in just a few minutes. The reason lies in the fundamental security issues of its architecture that trusts user devices. The solution is positioned as "privacy-friendly," but it can actually be easily cracked. Its development path is summarized as follows: first, launch a system that appears to protect privacy but has vulnerabilities; after being compromised, use "fixes" as a reason to weaken privacy protection, eventually evolving into a surveillance tool in the name of privacy. Such "accidental vulnerability incidents" may be used to expand regulation, and the public is urged to stay vigilant.
According to threat intelligence released by the SlowMist security team (@SlowMist_Team), its threat intelligence system MistEye has received community reports identifying an active social engineering attack targeting cryptocurrency users. Attackers contact victims under the pretext of project collaboration and lure them into using a counterfeit “Harmony Voice” application (domain: harmony-voice[.]app) for so-called real-time translation—when in fact it is malicious software. SlowMist has already synchronized the relevant threat intelligence (IOCs) to its enterprise customers.
According to an official incident post-mortem report on the CoW Swap attack, its domain cow.fi was compromised via a supply-chain attack on April 14, 2026. Attackers exploited social engineering tactics to infiltrate the .fi domain registration process and hijack DNS resolution, causing users attempting to access swap.cow.fi to be redirected to a phishing site for several hours. During this period, attackers deployed a counterfeit trading interface and attempted to trick users into connecting their wallets and signing malicious transactions. The report states that this incident did not impact CoW Protocol’s on-chain smart contracts, backend systems, or user fund security; core infrastructure—including services hosted on AWS and Vercel—remained uncompromised. The attack occurred exclusively during the domain registration and transfer process: attackers gained control by forging identity documents and exploiting vulnerabilities in the registration workflow, briefly modifying the domain’s DNS records. The team detected the anomaly within 19 minutes and initiated emergency response procedures, subsequently migrating to cow.finance and fully restoring the cow.fi domain within approximately 26 hours. CoW’s team noted that affected users were primarily those who visited the official website during the domain hijacking window. Preliminary estimates place losses at around $1.2 million. The cow.fi domain has since been reactivated with enhanced security measures—including RegistryLock—and the team has launched external security audits, legal proceedings against the perpetrators, and is developing a potential user compensation plan. The official statement emphasizes that the vulnerability has been patched and outlines plans to improve domain infrastructure security through governance initiatives and industry collaboration.
According to Cointelegraph, stablecoin issuer Circle faces a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts for failing to freeze stolen funds during the Drift Protocol hack on April 1. Plaintiffs allege that attackers transferred approximately $230 million worth of USDC from Solana to Ethereum via Circle’s cross-chain transfer protocol (CCTP) within hours—and that Circle failed to intervene. The lawsuit accuses Circle of aiding and abetting conversion and of negligence. Cryptocurrency analytics firm Elliptic previously suspected the attack may be linked to North Korea–backed hackers; the stolen funds were subsequently converted into ETH and laundered through Tornado Cash.
Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, tweeted that Tether has frozen 3.29 million USDT in the hacker’s address associated with Rhea Finance. Earlier reports indicated that Rhea Finance was attacked via a fake token contract, resulting in approximately $7.6 million stolen.
Arkham monitoring shows that a U.S. government address has just transferred $606,470 worth of Bitcoin to Coinbase Prime. This Bitcoin was previously seized by the U.S. government from Ilya Lichtenstein, the Bitfinex hacker. It remains unclear whether this batch of stolen Bitcoin will be sold on Coinbase.