Kelp DAO claims that LayerZero staff approved the 1-of-1 verifier setup, a decision that LayerZero has since cited as the reason a North Korea-linked attacker drained approximately $292 million from Kelp’s rsETH bridge.
This claim flies in the face of LayerZero’s April 19 post-mortem, which found that Kelp’s rsETH application relied on LayerZero Labs as its sole verifier and that the setup “directly contradicts” LayerZero’s recommended multi-DVN model.
Kelp’s memo states that LayerZero staff reviewed its configurations for more than 2.5 years and through eight integration discussions, without warning that a 1-of-1 configuration posed a significant security risk.
The memo, titled “Setting the record straight around the LayerZero bridge hack,” includes screenshots of Telegram exchanges that document knowledge of LayerZero and lack of objection to Kelp’s checker setup.
A screenshot shows a member of the LayerZero team saying: “No issues with using defaults either – just mark [redacted] here since he mentioned that you might want to use a custom DVN setup to check messages, but you’ll leave that to your team! Kelp says the “defaults” referenced in the exchange were LayerZero Labs’ 1-of-1 DVN configuration, later cited by LayerZero as the application-level configuration that enabled the exploit.
CoinDesk was unable to independently authenticate the screenshot.
LayerZero models
Kelp also points to the scope of LayerZero’s bug bounty, the OFT Quickstart, and developer examples as evidence that LayerZero treated verification network choices as an application-level configuration while showing builders a single-DVN configuration.
The scope of the bug bounty released by LayerZero on Immunefi excludes from rewards “impacts on OApps themselves due to their own misconfiguration”, including verifier networks and executors.
The LayerZero OFT quickstart and the official OFT configuration example on GitHub show LayerZero Labs as the required DVN, with no optional DVN bundle.
Kelp’s memo cites an April 19 post by Spearbit security researcher Sujith Somraaj, in which Somraaj said he submitted a bug bounty report describing the same attack pattern and that LayerZero rejected it.
“My bug bounty: It’s not a vulnerability, requires all DVNs,” Somraaj wrote on Somraaj is a former LayerZero listener, according to his Cantina profile.
Kelp moves to Chainlink
Kelp also said he was moving rsETH from LayerZero to Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol. This change moves rsETH from LayerZero’s OFT standard to Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Token standard.
The exploit drained 116,500 rsETH, worth approximately $292 million, from Kelp’s LayerZero-powered bridge. Two additional falsified transactions totaling over $100 million were signed and processed by LayerZero Labs’ DVN before Kelp suspended its contracts, the protocol states.
LayerZero said the attackers are likely linked to the North Korean Lazarus group, which accessed the list of RPCs used by LayerZero Labs’ DVN, compromised two RPC nodes and swapped the binaries running on them.
The attackers then launched a DDoS attack against the uncompromised RPC nodes, forcing a failover to the poisoned ones. LayerZero said the DVN later confirmed the transactions that did not take place.
Kelp argues that the 1-on-1 configuration was widespread. CoinGecko, citing data from Dune Analytics, said 47% of the approximately 2,665 active LayerZero OApp contracts were running a 1-to-1 DVN setup over a 90-day period ending around April 22, with more than $4.5 billion in associated market value exposed to the same risk class.
LayerZero’s post-mortem stated that the protocol “worked exactly as intended.” The company said it would no longer sign messages for apps running a 1-to-1 configuration, a policy change that went into effect after the hack.
Kelp says his team had to report the exploit to LayerZero rather than the other way around, raising questions about LayerZero’s monitoring.
The memo also alleges substantial overlap in addresses granted to ADMIN_ROLE on the LayerZero Labs DVN and the Nethermind DVN, listing ten on April 8, 2026 and an additional five on February 6, 2025. CoinDesk has not independently verified the on-chain claim.
LayerZero did not respond to a request for comment by post.
On at least two integrated chains, Dinari and Skale, the LayerZero Labs DVN is still listed as the only available attester, according to the documentation.
