Kelp DAO claimed that LayerZero personnel approved the 1-of-1 validator setup, a decision that LayerZero has since cited as the reason North Korea-linked attackers stole approximately $292 million from Kelp’s rsETH bridge.
This statement is contrary to LayerZero’s April 19 postmortem, which reported that Kelp’s rsETH application relied on LayerZero Labs as its sole validator and that the setup was “directly contrary” to LayerZero’s recommended multi-DVN model.
Kelp’s memo said LayerZero personnel reviewed its configuration and had eight integration discussions over more than 2.5 years without warning that the 1-of-1 setup posed significant security risks.
The memo, titled “Documenting around the LayerZero Bridge Hack,” includes screenshots of Telegram exchanges documenting LayerZero’s awareness and lack of objection to Kelp’s validator settings.
A screenshot shows a LayerZero team member saying: “It’s okay to use the default values - just mark them [redacted] Because he mentioned you might want to use custom DVN settings to validate messages, but leave that up to your team! Kelp said the “default” mentioned in the exchange was 1-of-1 in the LayerZero Labs DVN configuration, which was later cited by LayerZero as an application-level setting that enabled the vulnerability.
CoinDesk could not independently verify the screenshots.
Templates for LayerZero
Kelp also pointed to LayerZero’s bug bounty scope, OFT quickstarts, and developer samples as evidence that LayerZero treats validator network selection as application-level configuration, while demonstrating a single DVN setup to builders.
The scope of the bug bounty posted by LayerZero on Immunefi does not include “impacts on the OApp itself due to misconfiguration of the OApp itself,” including validator networks and executors.
The LayerZero OFT quickstart and the official OFT example configuration on GitHub show LayerZero Labs as a required DVN, with no optional DVN settings.
Kelp’s memo cites an April 19 post from Spearbit security researcher Sujith Somraaj, in which Somraaj said he had submitted a bug bounty report describing the same attack pattern, but that LayerZero rejected the report.
Somraaj wrote on
Kelp migrates to Chainlink
Kelp also stated that it will move rsETH from LayerZero to Chainlink’s cross-chain interoperability protocol. This shift moves rsETH from LayerZero’s OFT standard to Chainlink’s cross-chain token standard.
The vulnerability drained 116,500 rsETH from Kelp’s LayerZero-powered bridge, worth approximately $292 million. The agreement alleges that before Kelp suspended its contract, LayerZero Labs DVN signed and processed two other counterfeit transactions totaling more than $100 million.
LayerZero said the attackers, possibly linked to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, accessed the RPC list used by LayerZero Labs DVN, compromised two RPC nodes and swapped the binaries running on them.
The attacker then launched a DDoS attack on the uncompromised RPC node, forcing a failover to the poisoned node. LayerZero said DVN later confirmed the transaction, which had not yet occurred.
Kelp believes that one-on-one settings are common. CoinGecko cited Dune Analytics data as saying that in the 90 days ending around April 22, 47% of approximately 2,665 active LayerZero OApp contracts ran 1-of-1 DVN configurations, and more than $4.5 billion in related market value faced the same type of risk.
LayerZero’s post-mortem said the protocol “worked exactly as intended.” The company said it will no longer sign messages for any application running a 1-of-1 configuration, a policy change that took effect after the hack.
Kelp claimed that his team had to flag the vulnerability to LayerZero and not the other way around, raising questions about LayerZero’s monitoring.
The memo also claims that there is substantial overlap in addresses granted to ADMIN_ROLE on the LayerZero Labs DVN and Nethermind DVN, with 10 addresses listed on April 8, 2026, and an additional five addresses listed on February 6, 2025. CoinDesk has not independently verified the on-chain claims.
LayerZero did not respond to the publication’s request for comment.
According to the documentation, LayerZero Labs DVN is still listed as the only available attester on at least two integrated chains (Dinari and Skale).
A LayerZero spokesperson said in a statement, “Sujith is correct that 1/1 configuration is beyond the scope of the bug bounty program. Our bounty focus is on vulnerabilities in the LayerZero protocol itself, not on application-level configuration choices. Otherwise, any application could be deployed and set itself as the only DVN to maliciously collect rewards. In the OFT defaults and GitHub examples: The protocol defaults for almost all paths are multi-DVN. In 1-of-1 When used in a template, it points to the “DeadDVN” contract, which rejects messages and prompts developers to properly configure their security stack before going live. It is inaccurate to state that Kelp uses the LayerZero default configuration.
Update (May 5, 2026 22:22 UTC): Add LayerZero statement.