TLDR Tech / Crypto
LayerZero Attributes Kelp DAO Exploit to North Korea's Lazarus Group
LayerZero attributed the $293M Kelp DAO exploit to North Korea's Lazarus Group (tracked as TraderTraitor), whose attackers compromised two RPC nodes powering Kelp's single-DVN verifier and DDoS'd the remaining nodes to force failover. The failover caused LayerZero's verifier to process a phantom cross-chain message that minted rsETH on Ethereum without burning the corresponding tokens on Unichain, with approximately $250M converted to ETH through a Tornado Cash-funded address. The attack, the largest since Bybit's $1.4B theft in February 2025, brings 2026's total crypto losses to $771M. Kelp had disregarded LayerZero's prior warnings to adopt a multi-verifier configuration.
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