LayerZero is facing heavy criticism for its response to the recent $290 million KelpDAO exploit after the omnichain interoperability protocol blamed Kelp’s 1-of-1 verifier configuration for the incident. Related Reading: Bitcoin’s Decentralization Narrative Under Fire After Epstein Files Claims LayerZero Blames KelpDAO For $290M Exploit Over the weekend, liquid restaking protocol KelpDAO was the victim of an attack that drained over $290 million in rsETH from the project after malicious actors exploited a weakness in the protocol’s LayerZero-powered bridge. Two days later, LayerZero addressed the incident, which became the largest DeFi hack of 2026, just weeks after Drift Protocol’s $285 million exploit shocked the industry. LayerZero attributed the “highly sophisticated attack” to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, claiming that it was a crypto infrastructure attack rather than a protocol exploit, and affirming that “there is zero contagion to any other cross-chain assets or applications.” They explained that the protocol is built on a “foundation of modular, application-configurable security,” using Decentralized Verifier Networks (DVNs), independent entities responsible for verifying the integrity of cross-chain messages. The malicious actors allegedly poisoned downstream RPC infrastructure by “compromising a quorum of the RPCs the LayerZero Labs DVN relied upon to verify transactions.” Per the post, the attackers swapped binaries for a custom payload to forge messages and used DDoS attacks to force failover to the poisoned nodes, triggering the DVN into confirming fake transactions. Based on this, LayerZero placed responsibility on KelpDAO for using a 1-of-1 verifier configuration instead of the multi-DVN recommendations: “This incident was isolated entirely to KelpDAO’s rsETH configuration as a direct consequence of their single-DVN setup.” Crypto Community Criticizes ‘Lack Of Accountability’ The crypto community reacted to the post-mortem, sharing its concerns about LayerZero’s response and criticizing the protocol for placing all responsibility only on Kelp’s security setup. “Imagine building a bridge and vehicles pays to cross, the bridge collapsed and you said it’s their fault for crossing the bridge. A classic clownery act from Bunch of clowns with zero accountability,” X user Saint wrote. Others questioned why LayerZero included a “1-of-1” configuration if the purpose of a DVN is customizable/modular security. “If the system allows this option, it’s not the fault of the customer who chose it—it’s a fundamental design flaw by the system that permitted it,” user Ditto wrote. “At the end of the day, the fact remains that the DVN RPC was compromised. DVN is a LayerZero product, and they are the ones who sold it to these teams,” he continued. Similarly, Chainlink community manager Zach Rynes accused the protocol of deflecting responsibility for the compromise of their own DVN node. He also criticized them for “throwing KelpDAO under the bus” for trusting LayerZero Labs’ setup that they “willingly support and only blocked after getting hacked, all while claiming everything worked as designed.” Meanwhile, Yearn Finance core team developer Artem K noted on X that the attack was described as a compromise of an RPC node and RPC poisoning, but that their own infrastructure is what was compromised. “Given it doesn’t say how the breach has occurred, I wouldn’t rush re-enabling the bridges,” he added. Wrong Diagnosis, Wrong Fix? Analyst The Smart Ape also claims that LayerZero made the wrong diagnosis and offered the wrong solution. Notably, the protocol’s post-mortem suggested migrating all applications with 1-of-1 DVN configurations to multi-DVN setups to prevent similar attacks. However, the analyst pointed out that multi-verifiers won’t stop the next multi-million-dollar attack, asserting that they could fail as all DVNs read chain states from the same handful of RPC providers, which are mostly clustered on AWS or GCP. If five “independent” DVNs read from the same three RPC providers, an attacker who poisons those three RPCs will poison all five verifiers simultaneously. “If all your verifiers get fooled in the same way at the same time, the math collapses back to 1-of-1. Five clones are not five witnesses,” he added. Related Reading: Remember Arbitrum? This Analyst Just Predicted That A 7,400% Rally Is Coming To solve this, the analyst suggested that every verifier runs its own full node on different client software, hosted on different cloud providers, maintained by different ops teams, peered with different subsets of the Ethereum network. “The fix isn’t multi-anything. The fix is that verifiers should attest to their own substrate, not just to chain state. until you can audit a DVN’s upstream topology, which RPC providers, which client software, which clouds, which regions, ‘M-of-N secured’ is marketing copy for a property that hasn’t actually been built. Lazarus didn’t break cryptography on April 18. They broke three servers,” he concluded. Featured Image from Unsplash.com, Chart from TradingView.com
ZRO, the native token of the omnichain interpretability protocol LayerZero, has skyrocketed more than 40% on the past day following the announcement of its new Layer-1 (L1) blockchain backed by major institutional players. Related Reading: XRP Positioned For Major Structure Shift As Price Tests Critical Level LayerZero Unveils Zero Blockchain On Tuesday, LayerZero Labs announced a new L1 blockchain, Zero, aimed at institutional financial markets. According to the announcement, it is set to launch in fall 2026, with three initial “zones,” described as permissionless environments fully owned and governed by the underlying network. Moreover, ZRO will serve as the network’s native token, providing interoperability between Zones and across the 165+ blockchains it connects. Designed to “eliminate the long-standing scalability challenges of decentralized networks,” Zero is set to process 2 million transactions per second (TPS) per Zone and charge near-zero fees by targeting four primary bottlenecks. “By leveraging Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proofs to decouple execution from verification, Zero transitions the network from redundant replication to a heterogeneous architecture,” LayerZero Labs explained on X. “This structural shift allows for two distinct validator classes: lightweight Block Validators capable of running on low-grade consumer hardware and optional higher performance Block Producers,” it continued. Bryan Pellegrino, CEO of LayerZero Labs, affirmed that Zero’s architecture advances the industry’s roadmap by at least a decade. “We believe we can actually bring the entire global economy onchain with this technology. Our mission is to build permissionless infrastructure for a better world – this is the beginning of that world,” he added. Zero Receives Major Institutional Backing The rollout was backed by key institutional players, including Citadel Securities, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), ARK Invest, Google Cloud, and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE). Notably, Citadel Securities is collaborating to evaluate how its technology could apply to trading, clearing, and settlement workflows. Additionally, it made a strategic investment in ZRO. ARK Invest is becoming a shareholder of LayerZero equity and ZRO. Meanwhile, Cathie Wood, the company’s CEO and CIO, joined LayerZero’s new advisory board alongside Michael Blaugrund, VP of Strategic Initiatives at ICE, and Caroline Butler, former head of digital assets at BNY Mellon. “This is a historic opportunity at the intersection of finance and the internet. I am thrilled to join LayerZero’s advisory board and help accelerate the adoption of Zero by the largest markets and companies in the world,” Wood said in a statement. DTCC will investigate the Zero blockchain architecture to enhance the scalability of the DTC Tokenization Service and collateral management, while ICE will examine it for 24/7 trading and tokenized collateral. Moreover, Google Cloud partnered to explore how to enable AI agents to make micropayments and trade resources instantly. Tether also announced a separate strategic investment in LayerZero Labs on Tuesday. ZRO Price Skyrockets Following the news, ZRO soared more than 40% in the last 24 hours, hitting a four-month high of $2.59 on Wednesday morning. The cryptocurrency had been trading between the $1.50 and $2.00 area over the past few weeks, reaching a local low of $1.35 during last week’s crash. Now, the recent momentum has pushed LayerZero back above the $2.00 area and toward a major resistance area. The cryptocurrency has been unable to reclaim the $2.60 mark since June, being rejected from this area after each retest. Related Reading: Bitcoin Could See New Drop To $60,000 Despite Bounce – Here’s The Level To Defend If ZRO reclaims $2.60, it could target the next major resistance, located at around $3.00. Analyst Crypto Tony affirmed that if the cryptocurrency clears this level, “we are good for $3.30. Wave 3 is beginning.” As of this writing, ZRO is trading at $2.45, a 36.5% increase in the weekly timeframe. Featured Image from Unsplash.com, Chart from TradingView.com
LayerZero’s native ZRO token has vastly outperformed the tokens of other projects including ZKsync and Starknet, which were airdropped around the same time.